


The Tale Is The Same (Told Before, Told Again)

by AndreaLyn



Series: Howling [4]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, F/M, Immortality, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 06:44:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18405272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreaLyn/pseuds/AndreaLyn
Summary: When Steve and Danny head to the mainland, unexpected tragedy slows them down from chasing after answers about Steve's half-fae heritage and where his mother has been all these years. Soon, though, Danny begins to suspect that maybe not everything is as it seems and the tragedy he's coping with may be somehow tied to Doris McGarrett. Meanwhile, back on the island, the rest of the team has to cope with a pixie infestation at Kamekona's truck.





	The Tale Is The Same (Told Before, Told Again)

**Author's Note:**

> For those who have been awaiting this, I apologize that it's taken me so long to get this final piece up, as I've had the idea for years now and didn't sit down to devote time to writing it and editing until lately. I hope that everyone enjoys this last little foray into this supernatural world and know that I had such fun writing it over the years.
> 
> While this probably can't be read as a one-shot without reading the previous, the main facts are these:
> 
> \- Danny is a Highlander-type immortal, Steve is half-werewolf, half-fae, Chin is a newly turned vampire, Kono is plenty human, and pretty much every single supernatural type thing exists - except ghosts. There's no such thing as ghosts

“You’re sure about this?”

Danny was conditioned to really hate those words. Whenever someone asked him that question, he instinctually drifted back to countless times throughout his past where that phrase usually preceded something terrible happening. The fact that it was a fae like the Governor asking them the question this time around meant that Danny was feeling _extra_ peachy about Steve’s big plan. 

“I am, ma’am,” Steve replied, ever the dutiful puppy.

“Fine. If that’s the case, then run the details by me one more time,” she said, sitting down behind her desk. Danny was fairly sure that she could feel the tension radiating through Danny’s body at having to be so close to her for a prolonged period (probably the longest he had ever been in front of her seeing as he tended to send Steve if visits were required). 

He didn’t think that it was weak to admit that he was absolutely and completely terrified of the fair folk and knowing that Steve was half-fae really wasn’t helping with that little cultural-induced fretting. The truly powerful full fae were people like the Governor; people that you wanted on your side. You only had to look at how she’d turned Wo Fat into a pile of ash and bone with barely more than a thought to see that you needed to behave around them. In Danny’s opinion, the best way to do that was to keep a wide berth of space between you and one of them. You couldn’t piss them off if you weren’t anywhere near them.

That plan tended to work until you found out you were mated to someone from that side of the menagerie.

It was also pretty nerve-wracking when you were sitting in front of one of the most powerful fae he’d ever known and pitching your stupid plan. True, it wasn’t completely a stupid plan, but as far as Danny was concerned, it wasn’t one that anyone came out happy at the end of, unless Steve’s mother defied all expectations and ended up being the kind of fae that was warm and fuzzy and not at all terrifying.

If she was one of the good ones, then where was she now? Why had she been in hiding?

Why convince your children that you had been dead for two centuries?

Luckily, finding Steve’s mother was only step two of this terrifying plan and Steve was starting with the more palatable of the two. The only real risk in this part of the plan was how long it would take for the both of them to get back to the east coast, seeing as they had never travelled together and Danny had some suspicions about the kind of flyer Steve was.

“I know that there’s a part of me that’s different,” Steve began, because no way in hell was Danny taking point on this one, “and I don’t know that the key is back in Virginia, but I need to go there. I’m half fae,” he said. Danny reached over to squeeze Steve’s hand, because the way his voice hesitated when he said those words was a telling glimpse into the whole issue.

Steve was still coming to grips with what he was, even if that was who he’d been all his life. Terrified and fearful of the future as Danny was, he was going to support Steve through every step.

“I want to go back to the family house, see if I can find anything that I might have forgotten. From there, we plan to head east to Asia to track her to the last reported sightings that turned up,” Steve said, with that scary glint of determination in his eyes.

It was the one that said ‘good luck to anyone who’s getting in my way’.

The Governor gave them a wry smile, shaking her head. “You really want to find your mother.”

“I do.”

“You know,” she said, standing to cross the room, heading for a set of drawers, “I never would have thought that you had any fae in you. You don’t present the same power, that _control_ that I would expect, but at the same time, I’m not surprised.” She opened the drawer and dug out something that looked suspiciously like she’d stolen it off a psychic, handing a small crystal orb to Steve. “This was a gift to me a hundred years ago. One-time use for each person that wields it,” she said. “Once you’re through with it, you must eventually gift it to someone else. It’s a tracker for something that you want.”

Danny wasn’t exactly impressed, because he knew about a dozen covens that could do the same thing without the tchotchke and were much more portable through airport security. 

The Governor must have felt his distaste, because she delivered a cutting look his way, silently asking if he had something to add to the conversation. Instantly, Danny reacted on instinct alone, pretending that he wasn’t doubting her gift, because that felt safer than opening his big mouth. The Governor seemed to move on, not because she believed him, but because he was probably small potatoes that she didn’t want to waste her time on.

Steve seemed much more impressed by the artifact, but then, he was easily enthralled by shiny items.

That was the dog side of him rearing its head.

“How does it work?”

“You imbue it with thoughts of what you’re after. The closer you get, the more it will light up.” 

Steve held it like it was a baby, cautious of it potentially breaking because he did something to it. Danny knew that it wasn’t without its magic; he could feel the thrumming of power from it, though that could’ve just been the Governor, but it still felt a little like using dowsing rods when you could just hire a private detective to do the work for you. 

Of course, he was also old enough to know that you don’t spit in a fae’s face when they offered you a gift.

“Thank you,” Danny said, even if there was a strain in his voice that probably didn’t make the words sound very sincere. He reached over to give Steve a squeeze of his shoulder, as much support for Steve as it was courage for himself. “We don’t know what being half-fae means for Steve, but we were hoping you could maybe give us some tips on what we should expect. Have you ever heard of Doris McGarrett? What are we walking into?”

“She’s someone I’ve only ever heard rumors about,” the Governor admitted, but there was an uncomfortable look on her face.

Danny didn’t like how uneasy she looked.

“And?” he prodded, needing to hear it out loud before he descended right into worst case scenario.

The Governor seemed extremely aware of Steve, casting an eye towards him despite the fact that it was Steve who was leaning forward, clearly hungry for whatever information he could get on his mother. This wasn’t going to be good and Danny didn’t need a few centuries of life to tell him that. 

“She’s always been rumored to be a woman you don’t want to cross if you and her have different outlooks on the world,” the Governor finally spoke. “She’s extremely embedded in fae culture and has been working to push our agenda forward in the world.” Her eyes cast to Danny for a long moment and despite Danny’s age, he felt extremely young and like a child caught in school when she looked at him like that. “I won’t stop you looking for her,” she spoke, but she was looking at Danny as she said these words, “but you should be careful not to put her on a pedestal.”

“Ma’am,” Steve said calmly, drawing her attention away. “I just want answers.”

“In that case, you have leave to go find them,” she said, giving the all-important permission they were after.

While it wasn’t official that you didn’t leave the island without her say-so, things worked differently when you were one of the supernatural beings living out here and especially when you were a group of them working for her. With Jenna heading back to the mainland with Lori, the team was still down a member and while Danny had no doubt that Kono could probably take over given permission, he knew that things were still a bit touch and go with Chin (who was doing a great job coming to terms with his vampirism, but hey, that wasn’t something you wanted to have to be good at). 

Permission given, Danny decided it was time to get the hell out of dodge. He reached over to squeeze Steve’s arm to prod him onwards and upwards, nodding to the door. 

“Come on,” he said, already on his feet and adjusting his sword at his hip so it didn’t get stuck in the chair. “We’ve got flights to book and a team to tell.” He wanted to joke and get a reaction out of Steve, get right back to their normal routine, but Steve looked thoughtful and a little subdued and Danny also didn’t think that you ought to launch into a comedy routine in front of the Governor.

Clasping his fingers around the small glass orb, Steve nodded his thanks to the Governor. “If there’s trouble…”

“Call me,” the Governor insisted darkly. “There’s a set of rules we all abide by and you might be her son, but you’re my people.” 

Yup, not terrifying at all. Danny was just glad that he was already at the door so he could make a hasty retreat the minute Steve stopped being polite and political, kissing the metaphorical ring so they didn’t get shredded to pieces the next time the Governor was having a bad day. He didn’t even feel safe until they’d cleared the mansion and were out at Danny’s Camaro, where he leaned his forearms against the roof and finally let out the sigh of tension he was holding in.

Steve gave Danny an amused look, playing with the glass orb. “One of these days, I’m going to have to explain to Rachel why we’re picking you up from the morgue after having a heart attack here. I swear, you don’t even look that stressed when you get into a challenge battle.”

“Fae are powerful and unpredictable creatures,” he hissed, keeping his voice down because they weren’t that far from the mansion and he didn’t want to talk ill when he could still conceivably be overheard. “Honestly, now that I know you’re half-fae, I’m a little scared of you!” He was gesturing wildly and lying his ass off, because he was Steve’s mate and the only thing that really scared him these days was when Steve hogged all the blankets and Danny woke up freezing cold.

Of course, if it turned out that the only reason he felt so safe was because Steve had no idea of his true power all along, then it wasn’t Danny that was going to be scared of the havoc he could wreak.

It was the criminals of the island who needed to feel that cold chill down to their bones. If they thought a wolf was insane when it came to justice, they had no idea what was lurking beneath the surface.

“You really thinking about using the paperweight as a tracker?” Danny asked, getting into the passenger seat of his car (his car, he knew, but again, Steve’s control issues were already bad enough and Danny didn’t plan on antagonizing them). “We could’ve stopped by Max’s and he would’ve given you something that was shiny and might see the future if you were after useless collectables.”

“What’s the harm?” Steve countered, sounding a little aggressive as he put it in the cupholder of the Camaro, starting the car. “If it works, it helps us track her down. If it doesn’t, I’ll give it to you so you can use it to hold down the paperwork I politely request you do,” he added with a smug smirk.

Danny didn’t bother giving a fake laugh because it didn’t _deserve_ one. “Just drive to Kamekona’s so we can tell the team about the plan,” he said evenly. 

It was rare that the two of them drove in silence the way they did, but Danny felt like they had their reasons. For Steve, he’d been wrestling with the mystery of what he was ever since his heat. For Danny, it was the same, but he also had his nearly five hundred years of experience to guide him and try to figure out what they were dealing with.

He also kept checking his phone, because he’d put out feelers to his contacts around the world to see if he could get more information on Doris McGarrett’s reputation. He didn’t want to know where she was, though, and Danny didn’t want Steve to find out about that part, but he thought a little caution wasn’t the worst thing in the world and avoiding Doris until he had more information felt like the safe play. 

“Uh, Danny…”

Torn away from paging through his text messages, Danny glanced up to see that they’d arrived at Kamekona’s truck. He looked back down to read through a message or two from a coven in Britain, but had to do a double take when what he’d seen filtered into his brain.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Danny huffed out in frustration, vaulting out of the car and waving his arms wildly around like he was trying to get rid of some birds. “Hey! Hey, get outta here! Scram!”

That probably wasn’t the official or correct way to deal with pixies, but if you didn’t get to them quick enough, it was worse than letting pigeons roost on your balcony. 

Kono was already there, but there was no sign of Chin (given the bright sunlight beating down, Danny suspected he was inside the truck in the shade to avoid feeling too sick). Then, there was Kamekona _feeding them_. 

“Big guy, c’mon,” Danny groaned, feeling Steve’s warmth at his back and hearing his subdued laughter.

Why was it that no one understood the ridiculous pest problem that pixies could be?

“Don’t feed them!” he protested, even though he was clearly too late to be the sensible one when it came to the infestation. All of a sudden, leaving the island to go find Steve’s overpowered, potentially crazy mother started to look pretty good over having to stay here and get rid of a mischievous magical species that had practically been handwritten an invitation to stay.

Kamekona made a sad face, like Danny had stepped on his cat. “How come? They said they were hungry,” he said, clearly looking like he wanted to adopt them all. 

“They said they were hungry, Danno,” Steve repeated evenly, in that tone that made Danny want to either kiss him or slap him to get him to shut up. 

There were pixies running around casting mischief spells on guests, there was one picking a fight with a dog nearby, and two were wildly using the condiment bar to create a mess. That headache that Danny had been fighting off all day was suddenly deciding that it was time to breed. This wasn’t the kind of problem that you managed in one day. This was the kind of problem that you needed a witch or two, a stiff drink, and at least two days’ planning to contend with.

Thankfully they were heading to the mainland and this problem would swiftly be off Danny’s plate the minute he could get on a plane.

Speaking of, that was what they came here to do and Danny refused to put it off just because Kamekona was an idiot. He hooked his fingers under Steve’s armpit to drag him away from where a pixie as trying to clamber its way onto Steve’s shoulder for a ride, whistling sharply to get Kono’s attention as he piled into the truck, finding Chin sitting in the corner, fangs out, hissing at two of the pixies.

“Everyone calm down,” Danny snapped, even if there was no chance in hell of him following his own advice. Honestly, it was a good thing that high blood pressure couldn’t off an immortal, otherwise he’d have been done centuries ago. He flicked at the pixies’ little green behinds and watched the sparkle of their magic trail after them, bitching at him in old Gaelic as they flew off to cause mischief somewhere else.

He knew he needed to get pixie wards around them. That would teach him to put off getting insurance and deciding to let Kamekona make his own business decisions.

Steve closed the door once Kono joined them, as it seemed Kamekona had no plans to chase off the invaders, cackling madly at whatever it was they decided to do now. 

“What’s up?” Kono asked, when Steve didn’t take advantage of the quiet lull in conversation to tell them their news. 

Apparently, Danny was doing everything today, seeing as Steve was averting his eyes and looking everywhere _but_ at his team.

“This is probably a bad time, given the situation we’re currently hiding from,” Danny admitted, seeing as this would have been a much better thing to talk about if they were sitting down and having a nice, peaceful lunch the way they were supposed to, “but Steve and I are taking some time off. We’re going to head to the mainland, have some vacation.”

They’d talked about this, too.

There was no reason for Chin and Kono to know about the real reason they were heading back to the States. If things got dangerous, it would be best that they were ignorant, seeing as Danny couldn’t say what Doris might do if they happened to find her and she was dangerous. Besides, they didn’t need to know about them going ruins-mining to Steve’s old place.

“You must have weeks of it saved up,” Chin joked, glancing between the two of them. “I think this is the first time either of you have taken actual time off that wasn’t sick leave. Even then, I’m pretty sure if it weren’t for Steve’s heat, you would have kept going.”

“Let’s not have the pot calling the kettle a workaholic,” Danny griped. “I’d say don’t burn the place down while we’re gone, but if you can’t manage to get the pixies under control in a week, torch it.”

Kono and Chin laughed warmly and even Steve gave a fond smile.

Danny, however, wasn’t joking. “No, I mean it,” he insisted. “The last thing you need are possessive, territorial little shits. Fix it or tell Kamekona to light a match.”

“I thought I was the one with the excessively violent plans,” Steve mildly commented, but there was this glint in his eye that said how much he liked the plan. Danny should have known it was a bad idea at that point, but it was the best plan of action you could go with, when pixies were involved. “We’ll both have our phones,” he said to Chin and Kono, apparently finding his voice. “We’ll stop in California to see Mary for a while, but then I think the plan is…”

He trailed off, like he was implying that there was no plan, but Danny could see the looks of suspicion on both Chin and Kono’s faces.

“We’re not eloping,” Danny insisted firmly, “and this isn’t some weird road trip. We just want some time to get away from the island and Rachel and everything that’s happened recently, it seems like a good idea. I’m thinking maybe hitting up some of my favorite old haunts, introduce Steve to real pizza.” 

“You guys deserve it,” Kono said, shifting to squeeze Steve’s shoulder, giving Danny an encouraging smile. “Besides, we can handle the pixies.”

“And Kamekona,” Chin added, his tone reminding them that the latter was probably a harder thing to manage than the former.

“We appreciate it,” Steve promised. “We’ll even bring back souvenirs.”

Souvenirs, he said. Danny was currently trying to figure out how to survive the trip they were about to take and Steve was promising souvenirs.

Instead of commenting on how much of a stretch promise that was, Danny faked it and smiled like an idiot who wasn’t about to go chase down a fae. “All the snow globes you could ever want,” he agreed.

And then, they were off.

* * *

Considering that Danny had been alive through the invention of flight, he still felt that it was completely unnatural to pack yourself into a plane and let a metal tube carry you across the sky. He’d heard about children of some creatures like harpies having wings who hadn’t flown on a plane in their life and after sitting with a tense Steve for hours, he started feeling wildly jealous.

“Would you stop harassing the poor flight attendants for trying to do their job?” he hissed, after Steve started trying to insist that he could go help with disembarking. “We’re all getting out of here eventually, okay?”

Maybe not all of them in the same number of pieces they walked in with, if Danny decided to murder Steve.

Well, attempt to. Given their new discovery about Steve’s parentage, Danny had some real doubts about how successful he’d be if he went at Steve with actual intent. 

The little glass orb was out again and Steve was turning it in his hands. Danny preferred this over Steve harassing the staff, but maybe only a little less because he still wasn’t sure about unknown magic artifacts. They hadn’t even had time to get Rachel to look it over before they had left, since she and Grace had been in the middle of a training weekend on the Big Island. 

“You whisper your Mom’s name into that thing yet?” Danny asked, trying to keep his smart remarks to a minimum. There was a time and a place and he could tell that Steve didn’t really want Danny’s humor right now. 

Steve shook his head, looking like he wasn’t so sure about doing that.

“I know that we’re doing this to learn more about my background, but a part of me doesn’t want to find her. It’s a really small part,” Steve qualified, “but it’s there.”

“Because she’s stayed away for so long?”

“Yeah,” Steve exhaled, and Danny got that.

After all, there probably wasn’t a very good answer to the ‘you abandoned me and Mary for centuries’ accusation. He could barely remember his own parents, if he was honest, but what he did remember was that they were decent people. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what would be going through his head if he suddenly found out that Mrs. Williams was a banshee or some other cursed thing and that she had been lying to him for centuries. 

Luckily, Steve’s unease gave Danny the perfect opportunity to reach over and pry the magical item out of his hands, squeezing Steve’s hand with his own in an attempt to cheer him up. Sure, he was more doom-and-gloom than cheer if you asked anyone, but even he had his bright spots in the dark.

What was the point of being mated if you couldn’t at least give one decent pep talk?

“Hey,” he murmured, shifting his body so he could block out the rest of the people on the plane (as if Steve’s wolfier facets wouldn’t still allow him to hear and see and sniff it all even if Danny were whispering). “Finding your Mom, that’s your past and it’ll be great if we do, so that she can give you an explanation for everything, but Steve, you gotta know that she’s not your future.” In fact, if she even tried to be, Danny had plenty of opinions he could share on that.

He was the one taking care of Steve. He’d watched his back through thick and thin. _He_ was Steve McGarrett’s mate and his family and if Doris had anything to say about that, then his sword was going to have to do some talking.

If Danny noticed his lack of fear when it came to threatening a fae, it didn’t seem to sink in, because the only thing on his mind was Steve.

“I got you,” Danny guaranteed, squeezing Steve’s hand harder. “Chin and Kono, Mary,” he listed. “We’re your family, babe, and no matter what gaps in your history your Mom fills out, she’s not changing that.”

Steve seemed to relax a little for that, which was enough for Danny to hand back the little magic snow globe, tapping it with two fingers.

“C’mon, put that thing away and get some sleep,” he coaxed. “I know how bitchy you get when you don’t rest enough and I’m not looking forward to a whole trip with you in that mood if you don’t get some rest.”

“Me,” Steve deadpanned. “You’re saying I’m the bitchy one.”

Danny was well aware that he was looking in a hypocritical mirror here, but hey, if that wasn’t his right, then he didn’t know what was. He dragged his mask over his eyes and pointed to his ears, like he was suddenly having trouble hearing. 

“I can’t hear you,” he replied. “Plane must be going through a tunnel!”

He heard the amused huff of laughter from Steve, but then nothing but blessed silence. No rustling in the seat, no attempt to climb out over Danny, and no poking him awake to worry more about what they were heading towards. Twenty minutes after, Danny chanced a peek past the mask and found Steve open-mouthed, drooling, and collapsed against his seat.

With a fond grin, Danny coaxed Steve to rest on his shoulder, absently stroking his fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck. With Steve out, Danny took over some of his earlier worry, not because of what Doris did in the past, but what she might do in the future. He meant it when he said that he’d fight her, but he didn’t want to find out how split Steve’s loyalties might be.

That wasn’t a fight he was prepared to wage.

Steve stayed asleep until they landed, which was a hell of relief not just to Danny, but clearly to the in-flight team, who visibly relaxed every time they passed and saw him conked out. It’d make Danny laugh if he weren’t such a ball of stress himself. Poking him awake only when they were the last few on the plane, Danny was ready to take on the mainland.

At least, so he thought.

When they finally cleared baggage claim, Danny dug out his phone to see how much he’d missed. Steve was doing the same a few yards away to let Mary know that they had landed and should be there soon. Danny was expecting a few updates from his contacts and maybe some information about Doris. What Danny didn’t expect was a dozen missed calls from Rachel.

Frozen, Danny gaped at his phone, panic settling in his stomach like a stone sinking in a lake. He didn’t even realize that he’d stopped moving until he felt Steve’s hand on his shoulder, steering him towards a quiet corner of the airport. 

“What is it?” Steve asked.

“Rachel,” Danny said, mouth dry as he worked up the courage to call her back. If the missed calls weren’t enough, the frantic and sharp texts that demanded him to ‘CALL ME would have done the trick. “Something’s happened.”

“Grace?”

Danny shook his head, because he didn’t think it would be Grace. There would have been about thirty missed calls for Grace and he wouldn’t have put it past her to send someone onto the plane to deliver the message. Maybe it was just something happening on the island, maybe it was a dragon or something deep and dark hatching out of the ocean. He had a bad feeling he wasn’t that lucky, though. 

“Call her,” Steve insisted. “I’m here, babe. I got you.” 

He squeezed Danny’s shoulders while Danny stared at the phone, in a weird place of knowing that the longer he didn’t call back, the longer he could spend in ignorance pretending that nothing had happened. That couldn’t last forever and he was too old to ignore his problems like that. With a steady breath, he inhaled and called Rachel, trying to let his attention focus on the steady push of Steve’s thumbs into his neck, the warmth of his mate’s touch, something (anything) to calm him down.

“Daniel,” Rachel sounded wrecked and Danny instantly knew that this wasn’t good. “You landed safely? You’re fine, no one is after you?”

As always with airports, there was a buzz of other immortals lurking, but none that looked like they wanted to have his head on a platter. “I’m fine,” he promised. “I got Steve here, anyone looks at me funny, they’re going to have Cujo on their ass. Rachel, what happened?”

He heard the inhale and the sharp catch of breath over the line, the sound of a woman well-accustomed to tragedy bracing herself for the news.

“Please tell me it’s not Grace,” Danny begged.

“No,” Rachel assured, “but it’s one of our others.”

All of a sudden, Grace being safe wasn’t the relief that it should have been. He and Rachel had taken in so many children over the years that would one day become immortals, setting them out into the world once they were trained and ready. In the nearly five centuries of them knowing each other, there had been thirty of them, of which sixteen were still alive.

Which one of their children had been taken this time? 

Danny breathed in slowly, held his inhalation when his chest was full. He could feel the grief pressing in and he hated that Steve was running a hand over his back in circles, like he was the one who needed to be comforted. The whole point of this trip was to get Steve some answers and to be a rock for him, not the other way around.

“Tell me,” he pleaded, when Rachel let the silence hang.

“Matthew,” Rachel said, breath hitching as she said his name. “He was in Columbia recently, and I don’t think his business was completely above board, but this wasn’t just some drug lord seeking out revenge. I wish it were, because a bullet he could bounce back from. No, this was a duel.”

She didn’t have to say the rest. There was a duel and Matt lost. 

Stupid, _stupid_ Mattie. While Grace was their current youngest, Matt was one of their other children that he’d felt so attached to for so long. They’d first met when Matt was a teen, before he'd experienced his first death. He was brash and loud and annoying and funny, a lot like Danny himself, and he’d taken to him so quickly that Rachel had never hesitated in giving Danny the reins on that mentorship.

“Who?” Danny asked, feeling hollow, like a part of him had been carved out by the news.

“Marco Reyes. Do you know the name?”

Danny shook his head, even though he knew Rachel couldn’t see it. “No one I know. And if it’s no one you know, then it’s probably not someone coming after us,” he said, even though that didn’t make a difference. He could see Steve running through his mental list of contacts, but he wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or angry when even Steve didn’t seem to have a lead.

On the one hand, at least it didn’t seem to be some sort of targeted attack of him or Rachel.

Unfortunately, that did absolutely nothing to help with the _rage_. 

“Babe,” Danny said, feeling helpless and exhausted, gesturing to the bags. “I need some time with Rach to process this. Can you get the bags, and I’ll come join you when I’m ready?” He wasn’t entirely sure when that would be, but for a few minutes, he needed to talk to Rachel and reminisce about their boy before they figured out what happened next.

“Take all the time you need, Danno,” Steve said, and there was a look on his face that Danny recognized.

Sheer, unbridled determination. Whatever grief Danny might be feeling, Steve was already moving on to anger, and he planned to do something about it. 

_Good_ , thought Danny. Because after they found Steve’s mother, they had a new mission, and he needed for one of them to be feeling anger. Danny would make his way there eventually, but as he wandered off to a quieter corner, he gave himself permission to grieve for a little while longer. It wouldn’t last forever. When he had made his way to the other side of it, this Marco Reyes was going to learn why you didn’t fuck with the Williams family and walk away without consequences.

* * *

With Danny on the phone with Rachel to talk through the steps they planned to take next, Steve used the time for a check-in, especially seeing as when he and Danny had left, it didn’t seem like they had a solution to the pixies just yet. Casting one last worried look back Danny’s way, Steve dialled Kono’s number, shutting down on that personal side of his life so he could focus on the professional one.

“Boss,” Kono picked up within a few rings, but her voice was tense.

Steve wasn’t a gambling man, but he suspected that the pixie situation wasn’t exactly dealt with.

“Tell me he stopped feeding them,” Steve started, because if he had to fly back to Oahu just to deal with pixies when things were getting worse here, someone was definitely going to owe him a juicy steak.

Kono let out a heavy sigh. “He did, but that only made them angrier.”

Pixies who had been given free reign now being deprived? Steve could see it. “How bad?”

“They started to put spells into Kame’s food,” Kono said, and while she sounded stressed, it seemed like there was the hint of something amused coming. “Chin didn’t know that they also got to his blood supply and…”

“What?” Steve prodded, because he could use the cheer.

“Let’s just say that cuz looks good with the bright blue hair.”

Steve felt like there were better ways of delivering the bad news, but better to get it over with. “Take pictures. Danny could use a bit of good news.”

“What happened?”

Steve glanced over to where Danny was pacing, yanking at his hair and gesturing wildly as he did. He didn’t think that he’d mind if Steve told the team, because Kono and Chin were trustworthy and he imagined that Rachel would tell them soon enough anyway. “One of his and Rachel’s kids got in a fight and lost.”

“Do we know who did it?”

“Marco Reyes,” Steve said, hoping that maybe Kono could give them a lead. He wished so badly that he recognized the name. “You ever heard of him?”

“I’ve heard his name when it comes to drug-running,” was all Kono seemed to know on the subject. “Definitely not winning philanthropist of the year anytime soon. What was Danny’s kid doing in that situation?”

That, Steve didn’t know and he felt like it might have been too dangerous for him to ask without earning Danny’s rage directed at him, which was something he was definitely looking to avoid. “That’s a good question that I don’t plan on bringing up until Danny’s moved away from some of that grief. You’ll look into him?”

“I’ll ask Adam if the name rings a bell from his past life,” Kono confirmed.

“Good,” Steve said, and the situation being this grave was all that kept him from teasing Kono about her developing relationship with the former Yakuza witch. What also kept him from teasing was that he could see Danny from where he stood and the grief that lined his face was _awful_. “Text me when the pixies are dealt with.”

“So long as we get daily updates from you,” Kono negotiated. “This whole thing, I’ve got a bad feeling about it.”

Kono was completely mortal, but Steve felt like there was a harrowing sliver of the precognitive in that statement.

He had a bad feeling too. 

“Daily updates, I promise, but I gotta go,” Steve said, when he saw Danny walking over, his phone in his pocket and shoulders hunched forward with the weight of the grief. He hadn’t taken his hand off his sword since he got the news and Steve really didn’t want him to get into a battle before they picked up the rental car. “We’re heading to Mary’s for the night, then we’ll be in Virginia by tomorrow afternoon. You’ve got the pixie situation in hand?” 

“Copy that,” Kono agreed. “I’ll send pictures when I can. Tell Danny…”

The silence dragged on and Steve could see Kono searching for the right words. 

“Tell him that we’ve got his back. I’ll look into Reyes for you while we deal with the pixies. You take care of him, boss.”

“Always,” Steve vowed, staring at Danny with the determination of a man who knew that they had multiple mountains in front of them, but was prepared to take them all down. He shifted their bags and held Danny’s out for him, wrapping an arm around his shoulders when he got in close enough.

“Kamekona stopped feeding them?”

“Yeah, and Chin’s hair color paid the price for it,” Steve agreed, glad that Danny was ready to switch to a new topic, but not so sure he wanted Danny to avoid talking about Matt forever. “Kono’s going to look into Reyes,” he said, guiding the topic back in a direction that he knew Danny probably didn’t want to focus on, but they needed to keep it on the horizon. “As soon as we’re back from Asia and we find my mother, we’re getting him.”

“ _I’m_ getting him,” Danny clarified. “I’m going to slit that son of a bitch’s throat and then cut through the rest of it.”

Of all of Danny’s lost children, Steve had to wonder how many of their killers had been felled by Danny’s sword. Judging by the vengeful look on his face, he had a feeling that the answer was all of them.

“Come on, let’s go see Mary,” Steve coaxed. “See what she wants me to grab from the house. We’ll get Reyes, Danny, I promise.”

From the look on Danny’s face, he agreed in full. It wasn’t a question of if. It was just a matter of when.

* * *

The drive from the airport to the house felt like an eternity. 

The visit with Mary had been awkward. She didn’t want to ask too many questions about what had happened with Matt Williams and Steve felt strange talking about the quest to find their mother, even if Danny kept bringing it up in conversation. When leaving, Mary had given him set instructions to watch out for Danny in case he did something stupid, which was a reversal of how their relationship usually worked with Danny playing the sensible one to Steve’s insanity. 

The flight to Virginia had been quiet and Steve was counting down the minutes until they got to the old cabin, at this point, because he didn’t know how much more silence he could take.

Steve knew from talking to Danny in the past that this wasn’t the first time that he and Rachel had lost one of their “children”, but Steve had never seen Danny during the period after. Frankly? This side of Danny scared him.

Steve was so used to Danny’s movement and noise being a constant and overwhelming thing that to have him sit silently and motionless in the passenger seat of the car was unnatural. He’d tried a few times to spark conversation, but with no luck. Swallowing back that frustration at not being able to help, Steve needed to change tactics. 

“Hey,” Steve said, “What do you think about getting something to eat?”

He got a grunt in return, like Danny had decided to give up on the whole English language. “Let’s just look at the house first,” he said quietly, texting someone. “We can check into the hotel and get food after.”

The quiet energy Danny was exuding was terrifying Steve a little. It was so unnatural, but he didn’t know what to do about that. When you piled on his anxiety and worry about going to the old house, the car was thick with tension. If this were a vacation, it would have been a contender for the world’s worst, at this rate.

“Do you want to talk about Matt?” Steve suggested, because they still had another half hour to go and Steve didn’t think he could bear to sit in the constant silence without going a little mad himself. Maybe it was best to face the grief head on.

Danny’s jaw tensed up, but his eyes softened, so Steve felt like he hadn’t completely misstepped.

“We met him in the thirties,” Danny started. “He was thirteen, got kicked out of his house for being a troublemaker and he decided he liked the freedom. He was living in an alley in New York when we found him and figured out what he was. Rachel didn’t want to take him, but I don’t know, he reminded me of myself.”

Steve didn’t interrupt Danny as he listened, already absorbed in this history, and he made a mental vow that after the old house, after Doris, after finding Reyes (they were definitely picking up one hell of a laundry list), then Steve wanted to meet the rest of Danny’s kids out there. 

“His first death?” Steve could guess, but this was Danny’s story. 

“He was nineteen by the time things were getting dicey in Europe,” he shared, which Steve knew all too well about, having been part of the Army at the time and installed in a few cities in Europe during those exact years. “He went over, died storming the beach in ’44.” Steve knew that it was probably a relief, because without a first and violent death, Matt would never have woken again. “We’d been teaching him enough that he managed to kill a few immortal Nazi fuckers on his way back to us.” Danny trailed off and Steve knew what the silence was saying.

_He didn’t win when it counted_.

“We’ll figure this out, Danno,” Steve vowed. “I’ll rip off Marco’s legs and then we’ll see how brave this guy really is.”

“That’s sweet, the violence, the bloodthirsty thing, but completely unnecessary,” Danny said, gesturing at Steve and mustering up a small smile, so he wasn’t completely out of it. “Matt was young. I’m not. I’ll be able to take him.”

Steve knew that he couldn’t interfere with the fight that was impending, but he still made a mental note to see if he couldn’t even the playing field before both of them got into the arena, which all revolved around tracking down Reyes. He set that in his mind as his first priority after the visit to the house and the trip to Asia.

“Hey, come on, don’t forget we’re here for you to take a trip down memory lane,” Danny said. “You’ve gotta have some stories about frolicking in the woods, crushing on some girl in town, right?”

“It was pretty isolated,” Steve admitted. “I mean, it was the nineteenth century, Dad didn’t exactly let me go into town to court anyone before I became a werewolf and we were on training lockdown after. He always used Mom as the story to keep us behaved…”

“Fathers will do a lot to keep their kids safe,” Danny said, seeing as it was obvious where Steve’s head was going. It was right back to that spiral of anger that he’d been lied to for so long, although, he had to wonder.

Did his father ever realize he was lying? Did he even know?

Steve didn’t know what was worse – if his father had been lying to him the whole time or if he’d been in the dark about Doris’ fae heritage. 

“Just a few more turns, we should be coming up on the property,” Steve said, gripping the steering wheel a little tighter as he calmed his mind, taking in the familiar scents from outside and reminding himself of the good memories this place brought him. “I haven’t been here in ages,” he admitted. “I think it hurt too much to imagine coming back here. It always hurt when I did visit, thinking about what my father did to my mother. Or, I guess,” he corrected himself, grimacing, “what he thought he did, since that was all a lie.”

Danny squeezed Steve’s hand and gave him a mustered smile.

“Hey,” he said. “Maybe I’m gonna like it so much we turn it into a vacation home. You really think we’ll be on the island forever? I got at least another few centuries in me and now that we know you’re half-fae, you could outlive everyone like the cockroach you are,” he said fondly. “Maybe this is our future house.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Steve agreed, feeling something settle and calm inside himself. The wolf remained calm as they drove through familiar paths, recognizing home. If anything, he felt better than he had in ages, because he recognized every scent, every sight, and everything around him (including Danny’s presence) beckoned him home to safety.

It also seemed like talking about Steve’s problems was helping Danny, because he seemed a little better. He was talking, he wasn’t looking like he might snap at any given moment, and he was staring out the window with a sad smile, but every once in a while when he looked at Steve, it would lift, like he was remembering the other good things in his life.

Taking the last turn, Steve slowed the car down as they crept through a leafy path, going up the long driveway and parking a short distance from the house. 

“There it is,” Steve said, staring out the front windshield at the log cabin nestled in the woods.

He didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t this. He had been anticipating a decrepit old structure that was falling down. As much as he loved Mary, her custodianship of the house had never been something she liked doing, so he didn’t think that he’d find it looking so good. Maybe someone from town had been checking up on it?

His fingers tightened on the steering wheel when something suspicious grabbed his attention.

“Hey,” Danny said, sensing the shift of tension in the car. “What? What is it?”

“Danny,” Steve said, warily. “Look at the chimney.”

There was smoke rising steadily out of it. Between the kept-up appearance of the cabin and the smoke from the chimney, this wasn’t a case of someone dropping by to take care of the cabin.

Someone was inside and squatting in his family home.

Danny’s hand drifted back to his sword and Steve reached into the luggage to find his gun, getting ready to face whoever it was that thought they could be here. “You want me to call the locals for backup?” Danny asked.

There was a prickling at Steve’s senses that he couldn’t identify, like a light wind blowing at the back of his neck. For some reason, his instinct made him shake his head and deny Danny’s offer. “Let’s see if we need the backup or if we can deal with this ourselves.” If some supernatural something had crept in and found a home, Steve would rather deal with it, not wanting to stretch out his homecoming with a drawn-out process at the station filling out paperwork.

He didn’t say it out loud, but if anyone thought they were going to come and take this from him, he would tear out their neck with his teeth.

Okay, so maybe he was feeling a little heightened stress between the impending search for his mother and the bleed he felt through the bond which radiated Danny’s tension into him. He signalled for Danny to stay behind him, resisting the urge to shift into his wolf form, because a gun was probably more of a threat to an intruder than a wild animal.

He crept slowly towards the porch, clearing the area around the sides of the door and gesturing for Danny to flank the other side. Cautiously, he pressed his back to the front wall, inhaling deeply and steadying his breathing.

“On three?” Danny murmured quietly. Steve nodded, and began the count in his head as he tightened his grip on his gun.

_One, two…_

“Are you going to stand there menacing the door forever or are you going to knock like a proper gentleman?”

Steve felt his heart drop into his stomach. It had been over two hundred years, but he’d know that voice anywhere. It was the same voice that chided him when he tripped Mary on their way home from the schoolhouse. It was the one that taught him arithmetic and showed him secret alphabets, teaching him other languages. It was the one he overheard telling his father that she loved him.

No matter how far he went, no matter how old he got, or how much he changed, Steve thought that he’d never be able to truly forget his mother’s voice. 

He turned to find her coming around the corner of the wraparound porch, a mug in her hand, and a bemused look on her face. Steve wanted her to look different, so he could disconnect the mother that raised him from the mother that abandoned and lied to him, but apart from a hairstyle and the clothes, not a thing was different. 

She kept walking forward, in between the two of them, to open the unlocked door. 

Her presence had frozen both him and Danny in place. Considering they hadn’t expected to find her this easily (or on this continent), the surprise was clearly throwing off their rhythm more than expected. 

“Well, come on,” she invited, once she was four steps inside, coaxing them in. “You’ll catch a chill out there.”

There was a fire burning in the hearth and the signs of someone who had been living there for months. Steve was frantically taking in the room, acting as a buffer between her and Danny (seeing as Danny always radiated tension around the fae, but with Matthew’s death, he seemed even more high-strung and ready to snap). It was probably only his grief that had kept him from making a dozen smart-aleck comments already.

“Go ahead and put your coats where you like. Shoes off by the door,” was not a request, somehow made pointedly more in Danny’s direction than Steve’s. 

Steve didn’t think he could have said a word if he tried, so he wasn’t ready to intervene and give his mother hell for being rude to his mate. He still felt frozen, like he’d seen a ghost (impossible as it was), wondering why she was here when all the reports put her in Asia. 

“What are you doing here?” he demanded, feeling like he was a time delay.

They were the words he’d wanted to say on the front porch, but it had taken him at least ten minutes before he could force them out. It was one thing to come to terms with your presumed-dead mother being alive and to prepare yourself for seeing her. It was another to actually have it happen.

“Hello to you too, sweetheart.”

His jaw tightened and clicked, crossing his arms over his chest. “What are you doing here?” he repeated, more ice in the words this time. Her assumption that she could slide right back into his life worked wonders to strip away some of the instinctive desire to heel to her and curl up for affection. She wasn’t allowed to wander back into his life like this and act like nothing had changed.

Danny was hovering behind him, shoes off, and waiting for Steve’s lead on this one.

“I live here. It’s my house,” she pointed out wryly, taking a seat by the fire and gesturing for Steve and Danny to join her. “You boys can agree it’s not a crime for a woman to spend some time in her own house.”

The will for the property was read so long ago that Steve didn’t feel comfortable arguing whether she did still own the house or not. 

“You know,” she said, “I had thought this reunion would go a little differently.”

So did Steve, but he didn’t dare say that out loud. He was trying his best to parse through the lines of thought in his head, trying to figure out which one he wanted to start with. He could have gone for happy pride, introduced Danny to her, and told her how good it was to see her again. Unfortunately, Steve’s more impulsive instincts got the better of him.

“You wanted a happy family reunion after you lied to me and Mary?” Steve demanded, crossing his arms over his chest. “Not only that, but then spent almost _two centuries_ ignoring and lying to both your children?” He gave her a disbelieving look, watching as Danny settled his shoes near the door before drifting to Steve’s side to stand his ground with him. “Are you actually serious?”

“Well,” Doris said, hands in the air, like she’d made her best effort. “A fae can hope.” 

She was staring straight at Danny when she said that, and even Steve felt the way Danny flinched.

“Mom, this is Danny Williams,” Steve said. Even though he was taking a turn down a path where he was talking about the happier things in his life, it felt more defensive now. “He’s…”

“Immortal, your mate, I know, I know,” she interrupted and waved it off like he’d just told her Danny’s coffee preference instead of introducing her to one of the most important people in Steve’s life. “Detective Williams, I’ve heard good things.” 

She had a critical eye on him, which Danny didn’t even seem to process. Steve could feel the heavy weight of grief on his heart through the bond, like it was muting all the parts of him that were bright and passionate and so much of what Steve loved. It wasn’t all Danny’s grief, seeing as Steve shared in some of it, but it was mostly Danny’s.

“Mrs. McGarrett,” he said, politely. “Or do you prefer your maiden name?”

“Steve and Mary use McGarrett. Which means that so do I,” she said. “You’re how old?”

Danny snorted, and Steve felt his shoulders relax when he heard it, knowing what was coming next. “You know it’s rude to ask a man who old he is. Can’t you tell by the number of grey hairs your son’s caused?”

“I’ve heard stories about him too, don’t worry,” she guaranteed, her fond smile sliding to Steve. “Brute police force are usually three words that get included in the reports.”

“See?” Danny gestured to her. “You see? It’s not just me, the woman knows what a menace her son can be.” He seemed like he was still tense, but at least he was cracking jokes. Steve remained close to him, a hand on his back to offer his quiet support, even though it felt all wrong. He didn’t want to be selfish, but this was supposed to go down differently.

Of course, Steve would be a real asshole if he were planning to complain about that, given everything. 

“What about your last fight?” Doris asked, making Steve flinch. This wasn’t the way to charm Danny, given that he only fought these days to survive and his victory against Sang Min happened to be a bitter one on the heels of Chin’s turning. “I heard it was a bit difficult for you.”

“Mom,” Steve hissed.

He didn’t know how a situation could go from bad to so much worse in such a short period of time, but he could feel the crackle of tension in the air getting thicker. He also knew Danny well enough to know that if she kept going, then Danny would volley back in kind, peppering her with demanding questions about the choices that she’d made in abandoning Steve and Mary. 

Things looked like they were going to fall apart before they even started. 

It might have been Danny’s exhaustion that ended up saving them. Danny gestured towards the rooms and then nudged the suitcases with his toe. “I’m gonna go and unpack for a while, maybe grab a nap. Jet lag, you know.” He gave Steve a tired smile, which was clearly meant to reassure him, but he didn’t need the bond to know that Danny was lying. He felt awkward and like he was interrupting, so he wanted to remove himself from the situation. Whatever fire that Danny normally burned with that would have prompted him to argue back was diminished by his grief.

It was probably a good idea for Danny to remove himself from the situation. If Doris kept making jibes at Danny, then the happy reunion they were trying to fight towards was never going to happen. 

Steve felt like it was strange that Doris was being so critical of Danny, but then again, it wasn’t like he knew his mother at all. Maybe there was a history here that he had no insight into, maybe she ran into a few immortals over the years that she didn’t get along with. Whatever her issue, they could get into it, but only once things between her and Steve had been tended to.

Steve drifted to Danny’s side, sliding his hand over his arm as he leaned in. “Hey,” he murmured. “I can come with you. My mom and I can talk tomorrow, we can spend the night together.”

Danny shook his head, glancing over Steve’s shoulder. “I know this is a shock, finding her here, but this was the next stop on our trip, right? I’m gonna take a sleeping pill and try and get some energy back. You spend time with your Mom, okay?”

He leaned up on his toes to kiss Steve, a lingering kind of kiss that steadied Steve and made him feel like he was home all over. They hadn’t had one of those since Danny got the news, and Steve realized how much he’d been needing it. He forgot that they were in full view of his mother as he pressed his hand to the small of Danny’s back to pull him in closer, not letting him leave just yet.

Pressing his forehead to Danny’s, he closed his eyes tightly. 

“I’ll be up soon, okay?”

“Take your time, babe,” Danny murmured, bending down to heft up the suitcases. He offered Doris a tense smile as he left.

With Danny gone, the room descended into awkward silence very quickly. Steve had never been good at carrying a conversation and with his mother, where there was so much history between them, it felt painfully awkward. He didn’t know what he was meant to say or do, which she seemed to figure out quickly.

“Come, sit with me,” she invited, patting the back of the second armchair by the fire. It was an old, creaky leather thing that Steve faintly recalled from his childhood. His Dad used to sit in it, though not this version. This one looked like it had been restored faithfully in the last few years. There was a mug beside her chair and Steve felt like they had interrupted a quiet night at home.

He sat down, warily, and tried to figure out where to even start.

“How long have you been here?” That one felt safe. He knew there were deeper conversations for them to have, but this one felt like the easiest place to start. “Danny and I were expecting to see a wreck, but this place looks amazing.”

“I came back to it about five years ago,” Doris said, sipping her mug. There was a strong smell in it that told Steve that it wasn’t just tea. “It was a wreck. It was falling down and the road in was barely visible, but it was still a home that held a lot of dear memories for me. This is where I gave birth to both you and Mary.”

“The last we heard, you were supposed to be in Asia.”

“I was,” Doris admitted, and even though Steve used all his training to look through her for lies, he didn’t sense a single one. “I was working with the Council there in order to strengthen our relations with other supernatural, namely the Baku, the Jiangshi,” she listed. “There’s been unrest lingering from the last generations and I was there to help negotiate peace, which I managed to bring about through a truce.” 

Steve was glad that she seemed proud of her accomplishments, but if her mission was over and she had time to come back and repair the house, then he had to understand _why_. “So where was our phone call?”

“Do you honestly think if I called you and told you that I was alive, it would have been easy?”

“No,” Steve snapped. “It would have been terrible and hard. We probably wouldn’t have spoken for ages, but it would have at least been the first step. Instead, I come back here to show Danny the old house and here you are? The only reason we’re meeting again is pure chance.”

“I know,” Doris agreed, and at least she had the decency to sound guilty. “There are a lot of things that I regret, Steve, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to truly atone for the grief I put you and Mary through. I am sorry. Not just that I wasn’t there for you, but also that you didn’t know what you were.” She reached over to take his hand into hers, giving it a small squeeze. “When did you find out?”

“It was pretty recent,” Steve said, his cheeks prickling with a blush that felt foreign, but then, he hadn’t been an embarrassed kid talking about sex with his mother in…well, centuries, and even dancing around the subject of his heat-gone-wrong was embarrassing. “Something wasn’t right and Danny’s ex did some digging to figure it out.”

“You never had a feeling before that,” Doris prodded. “No instinctual gut awareness of your abilities as a fae?”

In retrospect, Steve could acknowledge that he _had_ them. No one could be as lucky as he was without supernatural intervention, but it wasn’t the kind of thing h’d actively noticed. There were times when he felt powerful and strong, where his charm was off the charts, but then, he was a werewolf. Every time something happened that he couldn’t explain, he turned to that. 

“Until I found out about you, I had no idea,” Steve said truthfully. “I don’t even know what I can do, being half-blooded and all. It’s got to be weaker, especially dulled by the wolf.” That was the part of him that he felt attuned to, because it was the part that he had been nurturing for centuries. He’d made it his mission to understand it and tame the beast, so to speak, so he could avoid losing all of his control, the way his father had. 

“You’re telling me that you’ve never used your fae abilities, never?” Doris asked him, shocked.

“No one ever gave me a manual for how to be what I am and my mother who could have helped me with that ran away,” he snapped back at her, his words feeling taut with the bitterness coursing through him. “I didn’t even realize I was a fae until my heat went wrong. Which, I’m guessing you also knew might happen to me and Mary, but decided not to tell us about.” It felt good to let all the bitterness out, because if he kept it in, it felt like it was going to keep poisoning him.

Doris didn’t look very sorry, but then, Steve hadn’t been expecting her to.

“I married a werewolf without realizing he was one, that didn’t mean I got a manual either,” she responded sharply. It didn’t look like either of them were going to get the touching family reunion that you saw on television, at this rate. 

Then again, given the fact that he hadn’t even expected to find her, maybe Steve was asking for too much, too soon. She was still his mother and his anger at her abandonment was rooted in his desire for her love and her company. He needed to find a middle ground that they could work with. 

“I want to learn,” he said, trying to appeal to her pragmatism. “I want you to be the one to teach me,” he added, and turned in his chair to face her. “Can we start at the beginning? We don’t have to talk about what happened to you and me and Dad and Mary, but I want to talk about the family. Tell me about the fae that came before you, tell me about our history.”

From the way Doris’ face went slack with relief and her smile began to grow, Steve knew he’d tapped on the right door. 

“Okay,” she said, and Steve ceded the conversation to her so he could learn as much as possible about a part of his family he hadn’t even known existed until recently.

They spoke for so long that Steve barely even realized that it was sunrise until beams of light started to creep in over the floorboards and the last embers of the fire extinguished. He’d learned about aunts and uncles, grandparents, and battles that had been fought. He learned about the existence of Councils and rules, and while it was all too new for him to understand how he felt, at least he’d been granted a look inside the door that led to this foreign world.

“I’m really glad you let me tell you that,” Doris said, her voice hoarse from speaking for so long. “How would you like me to show you some lessons, now that you’re here? We can work together to unearth some of those powers that have been lying dormant under your skin for too long.”

It was something that he’d been thinking about since he found out about his powers, but he hadn’t decided yet if he’d planned on asking the Governor for help. This felt right, like something that he wanted, but he just didn’t know how to ask for. 

It was an olive branch being extended to him and it was one that could be put to good use. 

“Yeah,” he agreed, feeling worn from the long night, but hopeful. “I’d like that.”

“Good. Don’t worry, Steve,” she said, her attention fixed on me. “With me at your side, we’ll have you catching up to what you’re meant to be in no time.”

* * *

“You know,” Adam said when he arrived at the truck and saw the havoc that was cascading down around it, “when you said that you really wanted to see me, I thought maybe you wanted to have lunch or catch up. This wasn’t really the third date that I had imagined.”

Kono probably should feel apologetic about dragging him down here, but she was starting to get desperate. Chin was still trying to get the blue out of his hair, the magic in the food was causing all sorts of chaos, and the idea of Steve and Danny coming back to find this mess still going on wasn’t one she planned to entertain.

Reaching out for his hand to twine their fingers together, she thought maybe some positive reinforcement could go a long way. 

“Now you’re bribing me with your affection,” Adam lamented, but he was laughing. “Lucky for you, I’m a sucker for it. It’s also your lucky day given that I’ve dealt with two pixie infestations before at some of the restaurants my brother used to use as fronts. So long as you haven’t fed them…”

Kono wasn’t doing a great job of hiding her annoyed face, from Adam’s reaction.

“Kamekona fed them,” Adam sighed. “Okay, not the end of the world, but harder to deal with.”

Kono should have known that was like tempting fate. She really did think that bringing a witch into a scene of magical chaos was a good idea, but it seemed like the pixies could smell him out. They started to surface from their hiding spots, hurrying over and creating a circle that trapped them in together.

“Dia duit,” Adam began, trying for the Irish Gaelic that pixies originally spoke, but Kono already knew these were exports and more Hawaiian than anything else. 

Wryly, she gave the pixies a look as they giggled and swarmed in. “Howzit?”

They whispered and laughed together, one of them zagging up to rest on Kono’s shoulder, chin in her little hands as she peered at Adam. “Kono, is this your boyfriend?” The tiny little chirped voice in her ear unnerved her, the vocal quality of the pixie magical and _quivering_. “He’s handsome.”

“Yeah, I thought we’d have a date, you guys want to give us some privacy?” She figured she might as well try the obvious tactic to try and get them gone, which was to politely _ask_ them to leave.

It was clearly the wrong thing to say. The pixies were stealing looks and giggling together, the magic in the area buzzing as it began to build. She’d seen this happen when they’d turned Chin’s hair instantly blue and Kono had a very bad feeling about where this was going. Adam was on the same page, from the fearful look on his face, not to mention how he was gently tugging at her wrist to try and remove them both from the situation.

“We can do that,” one of the pixies promised.

“But,” the second warned, petulantly, “you have to have a _good_ date!”

“So we’re going to make sure of it!”

That was all the warning before a slew of pixie dust was blown in their direction. Kono inhaled sharply and started to hack it out, wiping it from her eyes to see that the pixies had moved on to new targets. So much for bringing a witch to handle the pixies. “I’m not sure I want to know what they did,” Kono complained, turning to start brushing glittery pixie dust from Adam’s cheeks, rubbing her thumb to get it off his lower lip. 

“Here, let me get some napkins,” Adam offered, turning to wander away from Kono to get them. At least, that’s what she thought he was aiming to do, before he got exactly three steps and hit an invisible barrier, like he had walked into a wall. He cocked his head to the side like he was steeling himself up and then tried again.

Just like last time, invisible wall, as soon as he got five feet from Kono’s side.

She had a pretty good idea what just happened, though Kono definitely didn’t appreciate the fact that the pixies thought she needed this kind of supernatural intervention in her love life. 

“I guess we’re not going very far from each other on this date of ours,” she said wryly, reaching out to pull him back before Adam spent the next hour running into an invisible wall. She had a headache, but she didn’t think this was magically induced so much as getting tired of the pixies. The next time Kamekona wanted to feed anything besides Five-0, Kono was going to have words with him.

Adam was looking at her fondly, which made Kono feel slightly self-conscious.

“Do I still have glitter in weird places? Why are you looking at me like that, did they do something else?”

“No.” He made a face. “I mean, yeah. We’ll be finding glitter for days, I just really love how determined you get when there’s a case,” he said, reaching out to tangle his fingers with hers. “You get this little twitch in your brow, like you’re thinking about assembling a rifle and taking out the nearest offending enemy.”

“I brought you here to figure this out, not to...” She felt embarrassed even saying it out loud.

Were they really slacking off if no one was getting hurt? It wasn’t like the pixies had caused any deaths and Steve and Danny were miles away. Chin was sleeping because the sun was still high in the sky and even Kamekona was too busy to notice what she and Adam were up to. Would it really be the worst thing in the world if maybe she didn’t solve this today?

“Maybe we can sit and talk,” Kono offered, in a hush. “I’d rather wait here for it to wear off and maybe we’ll have an idea of how to break their attachment to this place.”

They both already knew what was going to happen. Once the pixies stopped enjoying themselves and patrons stopped feeding them, they’d get really angry for a day or two, enact petty revenge and then move on. In order to start down that road, they needed to have words with Kame so he would stop feeding them, set up a magical perimeter to restrict passers-by, and then coax them to leave with a token of good fortune once their moods had calmed. 

She’d suspected this was the plan since she finishing her research, so maybe calling Adam really was just Kono making any excuse she could to see him.

Then again, he knew the best plan for getting rid of them too, and he’d showed up instead of calling her out on drawing this out. Maybe they were both guilty of wanting to spend time together, so Kono was going to take advantage of the forced bonding. 

“On one condition,” Adam said.

“Oh?”

“You don’t mind a little magic, do you? I know it gets the pixies excited,” Adam admitted, “but since we both know that tomorrow we’ll be starting a plan to get them out of here, can a little really hurt?”

They were right back to that problem that sat in Kono’s mind. Should she follow the rules or should she follow her heart? 

“Okay,” she finally decided, giving her heart the win.

They could figure out the consequences of it later, but right now, she was tired of playing by the rules and being left with the consequences of someone else’s mistakes. With an encouraging nod, Adam set to it. He closed his eyes and cupped his palms together, breathing a spell into his palm. When he eased back, the air around them felt charged and fizzled with magical energy. In Adam’s hand was a beautiful pink and yellow rose, patterned like her surfboard. It was one of the most incredible things she’d ever seen and her eyes widened as she took it in.

“That’s real?”

“It’s real,” Adam guaranteed, reaching out to pry open her palm and set it there. “I want to show you that magic isn’t always evil or for someone’s personal gain. Deep down, it’s a connection to the parts of you that everyone has. Love, friendship, caring. All the good and the bad emotions are there, magic is just another way to manifest them, like you would singing or writing or surfing,” he explained. “I want you to see that.”

She wished that she could say that he didn’t need to prove it to her, but her experience with magic wasn’t exactly a healthy one, what with Adam’s brother’s attempt to completely mess with the island. These little gestures, these little things, were truly appreciated.

Even though it was only their third date, Kono really did feel like there was something deeper between them. She knew that she was supposed to be wary because Chin didn’t fully approve of this, but maybe Adam just had to repeat that trick with blood to get her cousin onboard.

“What about you?” Kono asked, laying her hands flat on the table like she was putting all her cards down. “You’re not going to be disappointed down the line to hang around with a boring human? I feel like the odd one out, sometimes. No special powers, no immortality, I’m just Kono.”

“That you could ever be _just_ Kono is ridiculous,” Adam insisted. “You’re more interesting than half the vampires I know, a quarter of the immortals, and definitely all of the banshees. You do not want to go to concerts with them,” he deadpanned, “it’s not a fun time.”

She laughed at the thought, but a concert didn’t sound like a bad idea. Most things with Adam seemed like a good idea.

“I am a great shot,” she agreed, not feeling like it was bragging if it was true.

“You’re great at a lot of things,” Adam replied, and if Kono didn’t know better, she’d say that he looked smitten. She could hear the pixies giggling nearby and she turned to look over her shoulder at them suspiciously. 

“Did they…?”

“What, make me realize how incredible you are?” Adam cut her off with amusement. “No, pixies don’t wield love magic,” he said as he leaned in. “That’s all me.”

There were times like this when Kono felt like she’d lucked into this thing with Adam. She’d gone on so many terrible dates or had non-starters that it felt so strange to be with someone that she genuinely felt excited to be with. Her thing with Ben had never been like this and no other guy had ever come close.

It felt dangerous to feel so much, so soon, but at the same time, she felt like she deserved some happiness.

“Besides, I may be a witch, but you’re surrounded by more magic than most people see in their lifetime on a daily basis,” Adam insisted, not sounding very envious.

With mated bosses, a vampire cousin, and what seemed like a revolving door of creatures coming to them with cases, Kono couldn’t disagree. “The full moon is the _worst_ at the office,” she confessed. She’d never told anyone about this because if she’d told the guys, they would have sulked forever and if she’d told Jenna, she had a feeling it would get back to them. “Steve’s moody for obvious reasons, which makes Danny moody. Chin’s the weird one and I can’t place why he’s always so off, but I guess because of all the supernatural activity, blood gets scarcer? So he’s on this weird forced diet and he’s pissed. I’m kind of tempted to try and line up my cycle,” she deadpanned, hoping she hadn’t gone too far.

Seeing as Adam laughed at it, it didn’t seem like she had.

“We always took the full moon off,” he admitted. “Even covens know better than to work duin that time.”

“I swear, there needs to be a handbook for this stuff,” Kono said. “Is there one?”

“I haven’t written it yet, but I’ll keep you in the loop,” he promised with a laugh. “I could definitely make money. How to avoid the mermaids during high tide when you’re surfing, not letting a psychic ruin your day, deciding if your boyfriend is an incubus or just really horny,” he kept going.

“I’m serious!” Kono laughed. “Although, all of those chapters would be helpful. Even that last one.”

“You have some old boyfriends I need to beat up?” 

“I steered very clear of the one self-proclaimed incubus in my high school class,” Kono proudly assured. “He got arrested for drug possession a few years later. I’m sure it won’t come as any surprise that he was entirely human.”

“The truly strange ones usually are,” Adam sighed. “Present company excluded, of course.”

They talked like that for what felt like forever and no time at all. She found out about his favorite childhood memories and in turn, Kono talked about how much surfing meant to her, and how she’d grown up learning tricks about the currents from the mermaids until they had closed their ranks and she didn’t get to visit any longer.

After the high stakes time they had spent together, it felt like they sorely needed to have some time to talk and be two people in the world, instead of having to worry about the next crisis. 

Kono’s stomach started to rumble as the sun dipped into the ocean and she glanced at her watch, realizing how late it was. “I guess those pixies aren’t the only things after a meal. You want to go and grab something?”

“Not just yet,” Adam said, rubbing his thumb in steady circles on Kono’s palm, content to keep staring into her eyes. “I thought maybe you and I could just sit here for a little longer and enjoy the company.”

“You know,” came a tiny voice from nearby after a long moment passed and neither of them had moved, “we took the spell off you an hour ago. You could have left.”

Staring into Adam’s eyes and holding his hands tightly, Kono felt her heart pound in her chest, knowing now that while she might doubt how fast she was falling, it still felt _right_. “I think maybe we’ll stick around for just a little while longer.”

* * *

It had been days since they’d first arrived at the house and every one of them felt like an excruciating weight on Danny’s chest was only sinking deeper and deeper, pulling him into the depths of that ocean of grief. 

Steve and Doris had quickly made a daily habit of reminiscing over breakfast before training for the day and finishing up with old stories over dinner. As much as Danny wanted to stay with them, he kept excusing himself from the happy family reunion, too emotionally worn. The worst part was seeing that bond between mother and son and how it just reminded him of poor Mattie. 

After a full week of the same routine, they had just finished dinner and clearing the plates when Danny decided to stop avoiding the giant death elephant in the room. He drifted to one of the guest rooms where he could have some privacy, taking a few deep breaths to prepare himself before he called Rachel for the first time in a week.

It took eight rings before she picked up and when she did, there was only silence on the line.

He recognized that desire to not talk about the issue _so_ well.

“Rach, come on, you know I can’t fly back so we can do our usual grieving routine, but at least talk to me,” Danny pleaded, after two minutes of silence grew unbearable. 

“So nice of you to finally call me,” Rachel replied, and he knew that the snippiness was a by-product of the grief, but Danny felt like it was completely unfair. 

He closed the guest room door behind him, not wanting Steve or Doris to overhear his spat with his ex-wife. “Hey,” he snapped. “Don’t do that to me. You know I’m here for Steve, that this is really fucking weird for him. We found his mother and he’s feeling okay about it, but it’s still new and strange for him. I need to be here for him.”

“And us? Myself and Grace?”

Danny felt like she was deliberately trying to pick a fight and he had to take a whole slew of deep breaths so he didn’t play right into her hand. “It’s not the first time we’ve lost one of ours,” he replied, trying to be the voice of reason and calm (as rare as that was).

“It is the longest we’ve gone without,” she countered. “I know it’s inevitable, but I thought we’d really struck upon a training regiment that made them strong and clever.”

“You know Mattie,” Danny said with a rueful laugh. “Knew.” He frowned, hating to correct himself. “When he was cool and collected, the kid was great, but he’s too much like me. He lets his emotions get the best of him.”

“Do you remember when we first met him?” Rachel murmured, and Danny closed his eyes tightly at the new wave of grief that hit him at the nostalgic and sad tone of Rachel’s voice. “He tried to steal your wallet and you _let_ him.”

“I could tell he was one of us, I needed him to think he got away with it,” Danny recalled, shaking his head. He’d been a police officer then, similar to now, but walking the streets had been one of his favorite parts of the job in New York. “Tracked him to that alley where he was living out of a dumpster and I swear, I didn’t even finish offering him a room before he was accepting. He didn’t even care that I was a complete stranger.”

“He left such a mess in the penthouse,” Rachel sniffed. “He never did learn to clean up after himself.”

It felt horrible, knowing that there would never be new stories to share about Matt.

“He was an adult,” Danny said quietly. “Neither of us had spoken to him in ages and if he was running around with drug dealers, then maybe we failed him.” He wished that he’d reached out more, but the last year with Steve had occupied so much of his time and his attention that all of his kids had become a distant priority, falling to the periphery. 

“Don’t say that,” Rachel chided.

“I can’t help it, Rach,” Danny exhaled, the weight of the grief on his chest. “I feel like this is my fault. I feel like I’m the one who failed him. I should have taught him better, I should have done more, I should have…”

He trailed off, knowing that he did this every time one of their kids was lost, but it never got easier and he never stopped blaming himself for it. Danny didn’t think he ever would. 

“Look, we should bring them in, we should go over training again,” Danny insisted, trying to take control of a situation where he felt like he’d lost it all. “Especially with Grace. She’s still so young that she needs to understand the ugly things that are waiting out there. We need to…”

“Daniel,” Rachel cut him off. “Remember, you’re there for Steve.” 

He could hear how it was killing her to remind him of this. She didn’t have to. He would have kept going down that dark cycle of blaming himself until he boarded the next available plane to get back to Hawai’i, but he wasn’t meant to be doing that. He had to be here for Steve and she knew it. 

He let out a slow exhalation. “Thank you,” he murmured.

“Know that it wasn’t easy for me to remind you,” was Rachel’s bitter reply. “Go,” she said. “You have a mate to tend to.”

He hung up and pressed the phone to his forehead, wishing that he could get back without abandoning his priorities. Before Steve, Rachel and the kids had been the one consistent thing in his life that never faltered. Now that he had a mate and a future, that balance had changed and sometimes it left him choosing things and upsetting people. 

Distantly, he heard Doris’ voice and he wondered if she and Steve were still going at it. Taking a few steps down the hall, his foot paused on a floorboard when he got close enough to hear that Doris might have been talking to Steve, but she was doing it in Spanish. Some suspicious sense told him to stop, pause, listen.

_Listen and learn_.

Danny kept his breathing completely shallow and barely there, more a corpse than a person. He didn’t have super-hearing, but he didn’t need it. The house was built in a way that most of the doors were open and she was speaking in a second language that she felt safe in.

Unfortunately for her, Danny had been around long enough to see Spain’s armada in the water and had picked up more than enough of the language. He couldn’t hear everything, not from here, and not without getting close enough for her to hear him, but what he could pick out was making his stomach sink with dread.

Because it didn’t matter what else she said, not when he heard one name.

_Marco_.

She kept talking rapidly, clearly not aware that she had anyone listening in on the conversation, but as far as Danny was concerned, it was enough to trigger his suspicions. Had they said his name while they were talking to her? He knew he hadn’t. Maybe Steve did, but he couldn’t imagine that he would have.

Those questions remained as he turned to leave before he got caught, but he hadn’t made a retreat before Doris said something else that erased every last doubt about her involvement.

Because there was no doubt in his goddamn mind when he heard Doris McGarrett say, _Matthew_ , that she was involved in this _somehow_. Why? He had no fucking idea, but he didn’t have a good feeling about it. That said, he forced himself to be objective, focus on the facts. There was every chance that Steve had told Doris about his kid and what had happened. She might have known that he’d died, even who had killed him.

Still, no matter how much that possibility loomed, Danny couldn’t shake the feeling that something was going on. He quietly made his way back to the room and sat on the edge of the bed, ready to let his mind work the problem. 

It was too quiet in here and it felt like every inch of the space was invaded by Doris’ presence. Needing to think, needing to escape, Danny headed outside without his coat to figure out exactly what he and Steve had walked into and whether he should be worried about it. 

He stayed out there in the darkness for hours, wondering which of these places Steve had romped around in. Where did John turn Steve, where was Mary turned? 

He stayed there for hours and thought about family. 

Steve had lost and forged his family here and it made Danny think about his. He knew that he owed it to Matt to follow his gut, which meant that he needed to let his mind wander the problem. That said, did he have to do it out here in the chill? Definitely not, which meant heading back to the warmth of the house and even better, the waiting warmth of Steve in bed. 

Doris’ words hadn’t left Danny’s mind; they couldn’t. Why would she be speaking in Spanish, why would she have said Marco’s name? 

Despite Doris’ hushed tones and rapid-fire speech, he’d been able to pick up enough to make him suspicious given that she was clearly speaking to someone she was doing business with and the fact that she’d said ‘Matthew’ was the part that unnerved him. He’d been pacing around outside long enough for the chill to cling to his skin. Crawling into bed with Steve, he knew that Steve would want to know where he’d been.

“Hey,” Steve’s voice, sleep-rough, was still alarmed. “Why are you so cold?”

“I’ve been trying to figure something out,” Danny admitted. He’d spent a lot of time trying to figure out the context of Doris’ conversation and what to do about it, but what loomed even more dangerously large was how to tell Steve that his mother might just be a murderess bitch who’d taken his kid from him.

Given the happy family reunion going on every day, he definitely didn’t want to lead with that. It definitely wouldn’t go over so well.

“So, what, you went outside without a jacket? C’mere,” Steve murmured, trying to draw him into his warmth, which usually worked on Danny like a charm, but he was feeling too unsettled to let himself be calmed and it did nothing to erase his doubts. His back was tense with the stress and Steve, even in his mot tuned-out moments, could read Danny like a book. “Are you okay? Is it about Mattie?”

“Yeah, sort of,” Danny admitted.

He didn’t exactly know if this was a safe topic with Steve. He trusted his mate to the world and back, but they were on unfamiliar ground, now. Before they’d landed, he wouldn’t have hesitated for a single second in talking to Steve about his suspicions, but over the last few days, it really seemed like Doris and Steve had been bonding and repairing the damage done by her abandonment.

Was Danny really going to be the guy who threw a wrench in that over some suspicions?

“I think that maybe your Mom knows something about Matt’s death.”

So, yeah, apparently he was.

Steve tensed up, so clearly Danny had fallen from that pedestal where Steve held him above all others. He knew that things between Doris and Steve were getting better every day, but he didn’t think the bond between them was so strong that Steve would doubt him. “Danno, are you sure you’re not just trying to find someone to blame for what happened to Matt?”

Was he? Maybe. Sure. He could be, but that didn’t stop his bad feeling. 

“No,” he decided. Even if this was a leap, it was one that he needed to take and he expected Steve to jump with him. He’d told Rachel on the phone that he had to be here for Steve and he was putting his family second. Was it crazy to expect Steve to do the same? “No, I think that she knows more than she’s letting on.”

“Danny, you sound _crazy_ right now,” Steve warned, sitting up and making moves to try and get Danny to hush his voice, like he was worried about Doris overhearing. “I know that things are bad right now, but accusing my mother sounds like you’re pinning this on her because things are tense between you two. We’ll get this Reyes guy, I swear,” he vowed. “You need to stop blaming her for this, though.”

“If she doesn’t know anything about it, why is she saying Marco’s name, why is she talking about Matt in Spanish?”

The more he spoke, the more he felt convinced.

Unfortunately, it looked like it was having the opposite effect on Steve. 

“Danny, she’s travelled all over the world. Who’s to say she isn’t trying to help us find information on who did this?”

It could be, but Steve hadn’t heard the way she spoke. Danny knew that this wasn’t some benevolent offer to help and maybe it was his prejudices and his fear of the fae, but when Steve challenged him, that was when Danny knew that his mind was made up and his heart was set in stone.

Doris McGarrett was involved, somehow. He just wished that Steve could see it. 

“Fine, you don’t want to listen to logic, then I don’t have to stay here and watch you try and play the good son with Mommy,” Danny snapped, shoving his shoes on and aggressively grabbing his coat. 

“Danny!”

“No, Steve, save it,” Danny snapped. “I need to go for a walk before I start saying things I really regret.”

He swore that he could hear Steve mutter ‘start’, but seeing as Danny didn’t want to get in a real drag-down fight, he forced himself to walk out the door and leave, grabbing his phone so that he could call a cab and put some distance between him and this _house_ before it started to rip its claws into more than his relationship with Steve. 

Something strange was going on, and he was going to figure it out.

* * *

Steve couldn’t sleep.

He missed Danny’s warmth beside him and every time he reached out to pull him closer, he was reminded of the fight that had sent Danny out of the house, fuming with anger and grief. Sighing, he reached for his shirt and tugged it on, giving up on the idea of getting sleep tonight. From the firelight in the living room, it looked like he wasn’t the only one up.

“Steve,” Doris said, reaching out to pat the armchair beside her. “Come sit down. Can’t sleep?”

Steve shook his head, curling up in the chair and resisting every impulse that wanted to shift and sulk in his wolf form, sniffing out Danny’s scent in the sheets and curling up around it.

“Danny and I fought,” he said quietly. 

“Is that why it’s so much quieter?”

“He went to a hotel, I think.” Steve wasn’t even sure about that, but Danny had made it plenty clear that he needed to be out from under this roof and didn’t exactly leave forwarding information on where he was going. He’d grabbed his wallet, his phone, and started walking. “He’s been so stressed since this whole thing happened with his kid.” Rubbing his face, he sank down into the armchair beside his mother’s, wishing there was some part of his fae-self that could sniff out the truth.

“Losing our children is hard,” Doris agreed. “Sometimes, you even lose them for so long that when you get them back, you don’t recognize them.”

Steve looked up from where he’d been rubbing his face, feeling like that was meant for him. It stung, more than he’d expected it to. “Is that what you think happened with me?”

“I didn’t mean to lose you and Mary for so long,” Doris insisted. “I didn’t expect your father to turn you and I didn’t expect the same to happen to your sister,” was her dismayed comment. “Things were complicated, too complicated, and I had business to tend to that took me away from my job as a mother. The internal council of fae had jobs for me to do and when you were both learning to cut your teeth in the woods, I was working. I kept working, for so long…”

Steve reached over to rest his hand on top of Doris’. “You’re here now,” he insisted. “We can make things work.”

“Oh, Steve,” Doris replied, smiling sunnily at him. “I really hoped you would say that.”

It wasn’t going to be easy, he knew that, but the work was worth it if it meant getting his mother back in his life. 

“I came back home when I’d heard that you’d mated. I wanted to know who the girl was. Or boy,” she peppered in there. “It didn’t really matter to me, so long as it was a proper _fae_ that you’d found. Better for it to be a woman, though,” she said, and Steve began to feel a pit of dread in his stomach. 

She was oblivious to his worry, speaking like it was fact and Steve was going to fall in line. He told himself that it was just old prejudices and he had to change her mind about it, but he could do that. Kids had to educate their parents all the time, try and get them to accept the decisions they had made. 

“I didn’t worry about it at the time. Even though you were half-fae, I trusted that the strongest part of your blood would rise to the surface and seek out a like mate. Besides, the Governor was there at your side, I thought for sure that she would help guide you down the right path.”

There was no emotion in her voice. She was speaking calmly, with no concern about his actual mating bond, and what if Danny had been right?

“Our lineage is strong, Steve. Even a half-fae like you has so much power. With another fae mated at your side and the wolf giving you that unique strength, it would have been new and unstoppable. So, imagine my disappointment as a mother when I came back to the mainland and every single source that I spoke to told me that you had mated with an immortal. Their only talent is not dying.” 

Now some of the emotion was creeping back into her words, but they started and ended with bitterness and anger. 

“Mom…”

“You can’t even see it,” she kept going. “Your power is dulled by your bond with him. You could be so powerful, Steve, with the right partner at your side.”

“Doris,” he snapped sharply, because he wasn’t going to take this for a second longer. Rising to his feet so he could loom above her, he needed her to understand one thing. “I love Danny and I’m never going to choose anyone else. He’s my mate, he’s the one I’ve chosen, and he’s my life.”

“For now,” Doris replied.

It was too calm, too light. It was too _knowing_.

“What did you do?” Steve asked, beginning to back away from her. 

He needed physical space between them before something happened, and he needed to separate them before he could possibly think that he was in any way compliant with something that could have put Danny in harm’s way. 

“Once he’s dead, you’ll grieve,” she said. “You’ll be angry at me, you’ll be upset, but eventually, down the road, you’ll recover and realize that I’m right – mothers always are. Your lifespan is far from a short one. In time, when you get over it, you’ll develop a new bond. You’ll find a good fae family to mate into and then we’ll ascend through the ranks.”

“Danny’s old and he’s good. He won’t die,” Steve guaranteed.

“I had his son killed. What makes you think Marco Reyes won’t be able to dispose of Danny Williams just as easily?”

It was like he’d been shackled with silver. The icy bolt of dread that shot through him was worse than wolfsbane and silver, all tied together.

“You killed Matthew Williams. Danny was right.”

“Technically,” Doris replied, sharply, “I hired someone and they killed him. You don’t get your hands dirty when you don’t need to, Steve. There are so many lessons that I’ve missed teaching you, but now we have time.”

She was reaching her hand out to him like she genuinely believed that Steve would go along with this. Maybe she really did think that Steve was the kind of man who would give up everything for power. Maybe that was the kind of man that she was used to being around. 

Steve McGarrett was _not_ that man.

She didn’t even _care_ that she was admitting to murdering the son of his mate and the man he loved. How could he have so badly misjudged this? Now, Danny might pay the ultimate price for Steve’s unwillingness to look past the tentative happiness he’d found in reuniting with his mother. 

It didn’t matter. He could fix this, he just needed to find Danny. 

“Where is he?”

“Steve, don’t _worry_ , it’s only a matter of time before…”

“Where,” Steve demanded, the objects in the room beginning to tremble as those fae powers he kept buttoned up so tightly began to rise to the surface. He could feel his body straining, like the power inside of him was desperate to be released with this anger. “Where is Danny?”

Doris didn’t seem fearful of what was happening around her. She calmly checked her watch and watched the seconds tick by, Steve’s patience growing shorter until he snapped, an old vase flying past her head and crashing against the wall. It did nothing apart from flick some of her hair back and her lack of flinching told him all he needed to know about her part in this. 

She wasn’t any family that he wanted.

“It’ll be over by now,” she said. “Go get some rest, Steve.”

“When I get back,” Steve said with a heavy promise in his words, “we’re going to deal with this.”

He slammed the door as hard as he could on his way out and didn’t even pay attention to the fact that he’d shattered all the glass in the window frames. He couldn’t give a shit about this old house when Danny’s life was on the line and it was his fault for trusting his mother over his mate. 

_Just be okay_ , he prayed. _Be okay and I’ll never make that mistake again._

If Marco had done anything to Danny, then his mother had better develop some fear. If he showed up and Doris had managed to succeed, then Steve was going to spill the blood of every single guilty person in sight, no matter how they were related to him.

* * *

“Pick up, Danny, pick your phone up, come on,” Steve shouted at the phone attached to the dashboard, gunning his foot on the gas of the rental car. He knew that leaving his mother alone like this was a risk, but with Reyes heading for Danny, he had to risk her escaping. 

He needed to get to Danny because with everything that had happened with Matt, he was far from peak physical and mental fighting condition.

Not only had he lost Matt, but he and Steve had just fought. He knew Danny and that meant he’d be distracted and off his game. He needed to get to Danny and haul him to a sanctuary before a challenge could be initiated, just so they could have some time to figure out a plan. Worse, he also had no idea what to do about leaving his mother out there, unattended and free to do whatever she wanted.

At least now when Steve thought about the years between her leaving and the reunion, he could blame it on her being absolutely batshit insane and not his or Mary’s fault in the least. 

When Danny didn’t pick up, Steve shifted gears, grateful when Rachel picked up on the second ring. “Something’s wrong,” she said.

“My mother’s a lunatic,” Steve said, even if he should have probably started with his question before that, “How do you know?”

“I’ve been texting Danny for the last twenty minutes with no reply. He hasn’t picked up his phone and when I tried to track it, it was nowhere to be found. I didn’t want to reach out to you until I knew for sure something had happened, given that he told me about the fight, but…”

“It’s my mother,” Steve said, taking a hard right that made the tires squeal. 

“Do you know where Danny is?” Rachel demanded.

“The Governor, she gave me something to use to track my mother, but I never fixed it on her location because she caught us off guard in Virginia,” Steve said, glancing to where the orb was lighting up the more westerly he drove, taking the next turn when the orb glowed brighter. “I’m using it to track Danny, but I need to get to him before Reyes can find him.”

“Why would she do this?” Rachel spat at him. 

Steve knew her anger wasn’t directed at him, but it felt a whole lot like it was. He got it, though. He planned to use all the rage and fury against his mother and direct it at Reyes. 

“She has this insane idea that he’s the reason I’m weak. That my mating bond with him is holding me back,” Steve bit out, aware that he was putting himself in a position to have Rachel yell at him. 

Right now, the last thing he needed was a millennia-aged immortal _and_ a powerful fae angry with him, but hiding the truth from her wasn’t going to help, especially not when he wasn’t sure if Doris had put any backup plans into place. Speaking of…

“I need you to reach out to the community. I’d like to think Marco’s her only plan, but I know better. I need you to make sure there’s no one waiting in the wings in case this doesn’t work,” Steve asked, slamming his foot on the gas pedal when the tracking device began to glow brighter as he swerved north. 

The silence on the line was tense, but finally, Rachel gave in. “I’ll start putting out calls, but I’m not hanging up until you have Danny in sight. I looked into Reyes’ reputation and he’s a brutal fighter. He’s taken down a frightening number of immortals,” she said, and Steve hated the way his heart was sinking. 

He refused to believe that he could be better than Danny.

“Danny’s better,” he said aloud, with a tone that demanded Rachel agree if only to keep them both sane.

“Yes,” she said, her voice steely and firm. “He’d better be.” 

Steve knew that Rachel had been the one to teach Danny all of the moves he used, how to wield a sword with skill and not the brute force that he’d learned during the war. She was one of the most efficient and terrifying women he’d ever known and although he’d never seen her fight a battle against another immortal, he had no doubt that she would do it handily. Danny always joked that she was thousands of years old and responsible for more bloodshed than most serial killers, but Steve didn’t think that was so funny.

He was pretty sure that she really was that old and that terrifying, which he clung to right now.

She taught Danny everything that he needed to know. That meant that no matter who this Reyes was, Danny had to be better. Even if he was emotional right now, tired, and grieving, Steve had to hold tight to that truth, because the alternative was thinking about the reality of Danny losing. Then, there was that hopeful third option – Steve got there before the battle could start. 

Glancing at the tracking device, he watched as it began to gleam brighter the more that he drove down an old country road that seemingly had no end, and no sign of civilization. How the hell did Danny end up out here?

“If things start,” Steve said, trying to figure out a world that he’d kept his nose out of, out of respect, “What can I do?”

“Nothing at all,” Rachel replied calmly. “Apart from take revenge, if things go poorly though you know as well as I do that tampering with someone who’s just absorbed a whole new strength is a bad idea.” She didn’t have to point out that if someone managed to best Danny, that was almost four hundred years’ worth of strength.

It wasn’t a pretty thought, so Steve just had to get there. Luckily, he was close. The crystal orb finally went haywire outside of a large empty field. “Rachel, I’m here.”

“Go,” she ordered. 

He hung up and shoved the door closed as he sprinted for the sound of metal on metal, which meant that he was too late. The battle had already begun and Steve wasn’t permitted to interfere. There was never a moment more than this where Steve wanted to break all the rules, but he sprinted for the outer edge of the battle and had to fight both sides of him – wolf and fae – that wanted to hep.

This was Danny’s fight. They were always Danny’s fight and his alone.

“Danno!” he didn’t know why he’d shouted, but he felt like he needed to apologize, just in case this went badly. “I’m…”

“Steve,” Danny snapped. “Kind of busy here!”

He had both hands against his sword to try and walk Reyes back. This was the man that killed Matthew and had been hired to do the same to Danny. Steve stared at him and felt his back tensing up as he took a look at a man willing to do this dirty work for money, aware that he was growling, but not giving a shit. His mother didn’t even deign to do the job herself. Steve forced himself to stay calm and quiet, not interrupting, but he fixed his eyes on Reyes and when Danny pinned him in a position that Danny’s back was to Steve and he had a clear line of sight to Reyes, he made sure the man could see his intentions in his eyes.

If Reyes walked out of that fight, Steve was going to change into a wolf right there and rip him to shreds. 

Something (and Steve had to hope it was him) unnerved Reyes enough that he fumbled and Danny was able to duck away from the sword, rolling to the side and keeping his own weapon parallel to the ground, catching his breath as he stared up at Reyes, assessing his next move.

“You want to hear what your brother asked for when I killed him?” Reyes taunted Danny, which was such a bad idea, but Steve knew it only meant Danny would be able to focus all of his rage on what he needed to do. “He asked for his parents, begged for them. You couldn’t protect him.”

“Maybe not,” Danny agreed, still on one knee while Reyes cleaned his sword on his pant-leg, like it needed to be perfectly shiny for the death strike. “I can avenge him, though. You always take cash jobs from fae?”

“Why say no? I get some power out of it, cash in the bank,” Reyes shrugged as he studied Danny, amused, like this was going his way. With Danny down on one knee and Reyes above him, it might have looked like that, but Steve knew this move from their sparring sessions. “His mother wants him single, but I don’t know. You’re not so bad.”

“I’m a fucking delight,” Danny snapped back at him, his hands gripping the sword even tighter as he watched Reyes. 

Then, it happened so fast that Steve barely saw it.

Reyes lunged forward to make his move, but Danny pressed on the heel of his foot that wasn’t on the ground, using it as leverage to roll past the descending sword, slashing at Reyes’ heel, severing the tendon on one, then the back of his knee with another strike, still moving forward until he was steady on his feet. Danny grabbed Reyes’ hair, sword to his throat once Reyes had sank down into the ground, wounds bleeding into the grass.

“This is for Matt,” Danny said, though Steve knew that even this wouldn’t bring him back.

They were going to have to figure out a way from here, but at least they would be safe from the immediate threat.

_Do it_ , Steve coaxed mentally. _Finish this, Danny, before he has a chance to do anything else._ He willed it through the bond, tried to make Danny understand that they couldn’t give Reyes an inch. 

Danny stepped back to finish with a clean swing, both hands on the hilt of the sword, and that was it for Marco Reyes. 

Steve turned just in time to avoid the piercing light that came with a victory, finally feeling like he could breathe again now that he knew Danny was safe. 

He’d never actually seen Danny at the tail-end of a fight. He’d never seen any immortal in these immediate moments after, but this was possibly the most incredible thing he’d ever witnessed. Steve found himself drawn to him like a moth to a flame. Danny glowed, as if all that power and energy couldn’t be contained as he soaked it in. 

Once the energy had finally and fully cleared, Steve sprinted for Danny, grabbing him by the shoulders to inspect him for damage, even though he knew that nothing would last for longer than a few days. He dragged Danny around like a rag-doll as he did, but Danny took it, standing there with a glazed and far-away look on his face. 

“You were right and I’m sorry,” Steve insisted. “I should have trusted you instead of a woman I’ve known, really known, for only a few days. I just got swept up in this idea that she was my mother and because I love you, she wouldn’t want any harm to come to you, but…”

Steve wasn’t usually the one who rambled like this, but the energy from the fight had managed to get to him, too. It wasn’t for much longer, because Danny grabbed him with more strength than he usually possessed, and pushed him back until he could pin him against the car door. He let Danny have absolute control, because with Reyes’ power absorbed into Danny, he didn’t even think he could fight back.

More than that, he didn’t want to.

“Danno,” Steve murmured, because he needed to make one thing clear before anything else happened. “I’m so sorry.”

“You’ll make it up to me, don’t worry,” Danny guaranteed. 

Steve could fight back against Danny. With his strength, he could probably even fight him off, but every part of him wanted to be compliant and let Danny have control. It wasn’t that much of a mystery to figure out that he’d like how this went a whole lot more if he leaned back and let Danny have his way with him. 

Danny was already two steps ahead of him, frantically unbuttoning Steve’s jeans to shove them to his knees, getting his own sweatpants pushed down.

“I don’t have any lube,” Danny hissed, pressing biting and possessive kisses up Steve’s neck. “So this is gonna be like we’re just two idiot high school kids behind the bleachers. Okay?”

“Why are you saying that like it’s a bad thing?” Steve asked, his neck stretched out as he tipped his chin skywards to give Danny all the room he could ever want, moaning loudly as Danny wrapped his hand around his dick and Steve’s, the dry friction not exactly what he’d ever ask for, but given that he’d thought he lost Danny tonight, he didn’t care.

Danny could fuck him dry and he’d be pissed, but he’d live with it, because he was alive to do it.

“Are you always…” Steve panted, rocking his hips into Danny’s hand. “Fuck, always like this after a fight?”

“Not usually,” Danny admitted, sounding just as breathless as he shoved his other hand down after a spit into the palm, replacing his hand down there and trading so that he could slip that hand to massage and work Steve’s balls. “Wit Reyes, that was more energy than I’ve ever had at once.”

Immortal assassin for hire. Steve didn’t need many more details to figure out that Reyes probably had plenty of notches on his belt when it came to other immortals and now all that power was Danny’s. 

Honestly, it was a miracle Danny hadn’t already come, collapsing with a need to let out all that energy. Steve wasn’t about to complain, especially not when he’d spent the last few hours panicked out of his mind about the worst-case scenario.

“You need to call…call Rachel,” Steve remembered.

“Seriously, babe? No. I need to get you off,” Danny growled. “My ex-wife can _wait_.”

Yeah, she could. Steve was of the opinion that Rachel was old enough, she could wait another _century_ if that was what Danny wanted. He shoved his pants down a little lower and forgot about all their responsibilities and the danger that was waiting for them back at the house. He didn’t care about any of it with Danny bringing him off like this.

“Fuck,” Steve gasped, and grabbed at Danny’s hair to tightly wind it between his fingers, hauling him in for a desperate kiss, knowing that with the tension that had been running high through his body and his worry over Danny, it wasn’t going to take much longer.

It was lucky that even after he came (like he was sixteen again, with no control of his body), Danny wasn’t far behind, and that did nothing to slow them down. Danny pinned him to the car, kissing him like he needed to do that more than he needed to breathe, his hands tight on Steve’s shoulders like he intended to leave bruises. 

Steve wasn’t sure how long they spent there, but eventually the kisses lost some of their aggression and Danny’s hold on Steve relaxed minutely. They didn’t move for a while, content to lazily kiss against the rental car until they had exhausted themselves.

Well, until Steve had. Danny was still thrumming with energy and could probably go another five rounds, if given the chance. 

Danny pressed his cheek to Steve’s shoulder, nuzzling in like he didn’t have any intention of stopping. “So, you believe me now about your mother?”

“Yeah,” Steve exhaled. “It turns out the crazy runs in my family on my mother’s side.”

“Babe, this is beyond crazy,” Danny said with a worried eye. 

Steve already knew, Danny didn’t have to remind him.

“So, what are we going to do?” Danny asked, and Steve sagged back both in exhaustion and relief that Danny wasn’t about to abandon him to this problem on his own. “Your Mom might be a complete bitch who tried to have me murdered, but she’s still a fae, and I know better than to mess with them.”

“Rachel was going to start digging into whether she’d hired anyone else in case Reyes failed. I’ll put her on a wider net, see what she can drag in. Then, we call the Governor.” It was a call he dreaded making, but she was his best chance. She’d been around as long as (if not longer than) his mother and would probably know the politics of the Council better than anyone.

If anyone was going to give Steve the leverage they needed, it would be her.

“Dibs on calling Rachel,” Danny said, and even though Steve wasn’t about to fight him for that, he couldn’t help feeling only a little disappointed he was too slow. “We’ll get through this, and then, I’m dragging you back to that damned island. I really wouldn’t have thought I’d miss pixies…” he was muttering as he dug out his phone.

Steve definitely knew the feeling.

He watched Danny step just far enough away to make his phone call before he dug out his own cell to place the call to the Governor, praying that she would have good news for him. He needed to get them out of Virginia, but Steve also needed to make sure that he could protect them, or they would always be looking over their shoulder. 

That wasn’t an option and he would keep working until he figured it out.

* * *

With Danny securely tucked away with Rachel (who’d just landed on a private jet that made Steve wonder exactly how much money she had squirrelled away), Steve now had to contend with the dangerous piece still in the game that was his mother. While enough time had passed that conceivably Steve could have cooled off, it had only helped to fuel his anger, like an icy rage.

“I want to meet. The house,” he said, voice clipped, giving his mother no chance to reply. “Be there in an hour. Don’t even think about running or setting up traps. I already made a call and you want to hear what the Governor has to say about this.” He hung up before he could give his mother a chance to reply, not wanting to hear a single word. 

The drive back without Danny at his side made him tense. As much as he wanted to keep Danny safe from whatever ire Doris might have at seeing him alive, Steve felt like half a whole without him there to anchor him. He reached out through the bond to try and calm himself, feeling the thrum of energy from Danny as soon as he opened it up.

_Couldn’t go a few minutes without me, could you?_

It was still new for them to be able to speak to each other like this, but ever since the incident with the siren, they had been working on cementing their bond. Steve’s heat had only made it stronger and while they weren’t in a rush to tell everyone that they could do it, they still indulged when it was possible.

Sometimes, it was only feelings, sometimes barely a thought, but sometimes like now, when they were both running high on their emotions, they could carry a whole conversation.

“I just wanted to check in and see that you’re safe.” Steve always liked to speak through the bond. It felt more grounded, like Danny was right there with him. “As much as I want you safe for this, I wish you were here. I might be the one with fur, but you’re the one with a real bark.”

_The entire island of Oahu knows it_.

“Yeah, and I don’t doubt that you’d love for my mother to know it, too,” Steve said, parking in front of the house. 

He felt tension through every muscle and while he had calmed down somewhat with the help of the time since the fight and now, not to mention a very helpful strategic conversation with the Governor, he still felt so worried about walking in that front door and confronting his mother with the fact that she had failed.

Under him, his phone vibrated and Steve picked it up to see that it was Danny calling.

“What, the bond wasn’t enough?” Steve joked, not bothering to say hello when he picked up.

“Rachel doesn’t like me doing it that way, says it looks too much like I’ve gone insane,” Danny said. “Besides, sometimes there’s no real replacement for getting to hear your voice. I can feel you hesitating.”

Steve let out a scoff. “I’m sorry, my fae-fearing mate is calling me out on being scared to go confront my angry mother who tried to murder you?” He felt like anyone reasonable and sane would also be hesitating the way that Steve was, so it wasn’t like he was being fearful. He was just being calm, rational, and extremely tense and the steering wheel was taking the brunt of the burden.

“Hey, babe,” Danny’s voice cut into his anxieties. “Look, we have allies. The Governor is on our side and personally, I think that’s more than leverage enough to make sure she doesn’t come after us. If she decides to do her own dirty work and comes for us, we’re gonna be ready.”

In the background, he heard Rachel’s voice, barely there.

“She says that she’ll personally take out her eyes, which is sweet, Rachel, but very terrifying,” Danny informed her. “Steve, you can do this,” he promised. “Call me when you’re done, I want to wait up for you. You’ve got this,” he added one more time, like he could feel how Steve really didn’t feel like he had anything under his control.

Steve didn’t feel like he had anything resembling control, but he did feel comforted with the fact that he had Danny behind him, as well as the support of their allies and closest friends. 

With that in mind, he locked his weapons in the car (best not to bring a loaded gun into the room), and made his way inside. 

Doris was sitting in her armchair before the fire and she didn’t look upset. 

“It didn’t work,” Steve said, because even though the whole point of this was to warn Doris off of Danny, he wanted to make sure that she knew she’d _failed_. “Danny is stronger than you give him credit for. You can’t just kill him so easily.”

She swirled her scotch, her eyes on Steve, but she didn’t look too concerned.

“He won this time,” she agreed. “He’s a strong immortal, but next time, I won’t send an inferior creature to do the work of a fae.”

“There isn’t going to be a next time,” Steve snapped. “You’re not going to touch Danny,” Steve began to lay down the rules. “You won’t even think Danny’s name and if you go anywhere near his family, you’ll regret it. No more immortal assassins or fae weapons or magical spells. Whatever it is you think you have up your sleeve, you need to stick a pin in it and forget about this obsessive need to ruin my life because it doesn’t look the way you want it to.”

Doris crossed her arms over her chest, clearly not ruffled by Steve’s intimidating tone like so many other criminals had been before. “Why?” That sounded too much like a challenge, which made Steve extremely grateful for the ally he had on his side back home.

“After I brought Danny back to the hotel, we made some calls.” He wanted to do this carefully and slowly, so that Doris truly understood that she didn’t have an exit out of the option that Steve was going to build for her, the place she was going to stay if she wanted to obey the rules of engagement. “Danny talked to Rachel, who reached out to her fae contacts and I talked to the Governor, and do you know what we found out?”

She didn’t reply, but gestured for him to keep unravelling the story.

“You were protecting Wo Fat,” Steve said. “Pretty risky, throwing your allegiance in with a vampire, Mom. You really wanted into that network, which would have been okay if you hadn’t started skimming some of that power and money for yourself. I also found out that you don’t really have a group. Witches tend to hang around fae, but you don’t keep any by you. It’s always just you, looking out for yourself, doing what you want.”

“I do what I do for my family,” Doris said darkly. “For you, for Mary.”

“So is there a murderer out there waiting to get anyone she dates too?” Steve cut her off, shaking his head in disbelief. “It has to be a fae or you won’t approve and your approval is the difference between life and death? I’m doing what I need to in order to protect _my_ family. That’s Danny, that’s my team. You don’t touch them.”

“Or what?”

“Or the Governor and the entire council will stand against you,” Steve announced, feeling powerful and not because he had the ability to unravel the laws of reality, but because he had made connections in the right places. “If you even think about hurting Danny or anyone that he cares about, they will come after you with the full retribution of a pissed off faction who’s tired of your shady deals.”

Doris didn’t seem pleased by Steve’s demand, but she wasn’t fighting against them.

“I’m so disappointed, Steve.” 

So that was how this was going to go? Instead of them talking like adults, she was going to try and guilt-trip him like he was still a teenager. Steeling himself for whatever disappointment or upset emotion she wanted to throw his way, he crossed his arms over his chest and forcibly let his face go blank. 

“Seriously?” he replied. “You’re disappointed in me? You tried to kill the man I love,” he snapped at her. “You’re more than a disappointment. I wish that I hadn’t learned you were still alive, at least then I could have kept my memories of you untainted.”

That one looked like it stung, given the way Doris stepped back, but Steve was so angry that he could only feel vindictive pleasure that he’d landed a shot. 

“I don’t want to hear from you again. I don’t want you going near Mary,” Steve started to lay down the law. “If you wanted me to be with a fae or to grow up in your footsteps, then you should have stuck around. Maybe something would’ve been different, maybe not, but that was your choice. You made it, now you have to live with it.”

He hated how this was making him feel. Because as much as he was aligned to Danny, this crushed any hope of reconciliation with his mother, which he’d set out looking for. In the end, she’d disappointed him like so many other people had in his life and now, he was about to cut her out.

“Steve,” Doris spoke, and finally there was a thread of desperation in her words.

This whole time, she was acting like she had the upper hand and Steve hated that. It meant that she was liable to try again. Now that she sounded like she had lost some of her confidence, he was starting to feel like he had a chance to get them out of this safely. 

He stood there expectantly, waiting for her to say something. 

“You’re going to regret this,” she finished.

He pressed his lips together and gave her a disbelieving look, scoffing as he shook his head. “No,” he said, sure on that one. “What I regret is that I put so much hope in repairing a relationship that never existed. You don’t want a son,” he said. “You want a protégé to follow in your footsteps, but only if I walk the exact path you want. Guess what, that’s not going to be me. Stay away from us. You won’t like what happens if you don’t.”

He didn’t want to give her a chance to reply. He had nothing left to say and no forgiveness in him for this woman, which meant that he just wanted to get out. 

Slamming the door behind him felt so viciously good and Steve didn’t bother looking back. He was happy to close a chapter in his life that he’d tentatively opened, feeling like if he’d managed nothing else, he had at least found closure. He knew that his mother was alive, now, and he also knew that when it came down to it, she wasn’t his family. 

He’d made a new one that was much more important to him. Every time, Steve would choose them, and this only solidified that deep belief.

“I’ll see you at the airport,” he told Danny through the bond, as he got into the rental car. “We’re going home.”

* * *

The flight home passed without incident, given that Danny was unconscious for most of it. He roused about an hour from Oahu, and took Steve’s hand into his own when he finally managed to move past some of his drowsiness.

“You finally over your post-fight exhaustion?” Steve asked, running his fingers through Danny’s hair. “That was longer than last time.”

“I’m pretty sure a lot of this was grief,” he admitted. “I don’t exactly do very well when I lose one of the kids,” he said, reaching over to take Steve’s hand from his hair so that he could squeeze it. They were on Rachel’s private plane, which meant that Danny had few compunctions about being so open with Steve. “What about you?”

“Me?” 

“Yeah, you. You might act all tough and macho, but we just severed all ties with your mother after you found out she was alive.”

Steve swallowed the lump in his throat. While he was excellent with denial, he had to admit that this was still really fresh, and it did sting to think about. It felt wrong to try and leapfrog over Danny’s grief, because he didn’t want them to be competing for who had it the worst, but it was exhausting to think of everything they’d had to deal with.

“I’m sorry,” Danny said, squeezing Steve’s hand. “I’m sorry your Mom turned out to be a homicidal maniac.”

Steve let out a tired laugh, leaning his head against Danny’s shoulder, like he wasn’t strong enough to keep it up without the help. It wasn’t Danny’s fault or his responsibility in any way, but he appreciated it. He managed a tired smile as he leaned his body heavy into him. 

“I guess every family gets one,” Steve joked.

“Yeah, and Rachel’s taking up all the space in ours.”

It was a daring thing to say, considering the woman was reading a book directly opposite them, but she raised a brow at Danny like he had no room to speak before turning the page with a pointed lick of her thumb.

“Look, just because your mother sucks as a maternal figure, that doesn’t mean you have to give up on learning about your powers and that side of you,” Danny said, turning Steve’s hand over so that he could tap his palm. “I’m sure the Governor would love to have you over for some lessons, expand the island’s protection. I know I’d like that. I’m not scared of you,” he said firmly, before Steve could ask if Danny feared him, “but knowing how you can fly off the handle every now and again, I’d like it if I knew you had some control.”

Steve didn’t think that he could do that anytime soon, but maybe with some time, he could see himself showing up for those lessons. Some days, it still felt like he barely understood the wolf part of himself and adding this new combination made him feel uneasy, unsteady, like he was unbalanced. The lessons would help, he knew they would, but he needed to work his way up to it.

“Okay,” he agreed. “On one condition.”

Danny narrowed his eyes, like he thought he wasn’t going to like what came next.

“You’re there for those sessions. I need you to understand how I work, how my powers do, in case I need you to balance me through the bond,” Steve insisted. “When I lose control, Danno, it’s usually when you’re involved.” Whether it was because he wanted to protect Danny or something he’d said just set him off, it still always involved him.

He knew that Danny wasn’t going to like it (he never did like spending any time around other fae), but he pressed his lips together.

“For you?”

“For me.”

Danny scowled. “Fine. I will be the bigger man and get over all my ridiculously rational fears about an overpowered supernatural group to watch your training sessions.” He kept muttering under his breath, but Steve knew him well enough to know that this was the very picture of ‘protesting too much’. 

Steve leaned over to kiss Danny in appreciation before the pilot gave them instructions to buckle up for landing. 

Settling back into his seat, Steve opened the window shade so he could watch the incoming landing. Even though Oahu hadn’t been his home for that long, coming back felt right. The trip back to Virginia to show Danny his home had been important and it would always hold a piece of his past, but he was more than okay to not let it take up any of his present or future.

At the airport, Rachel parted ways with strict instructions that they were to check in, seeing as they were still working on ensuring none of Doris’s contingencies plans were poised to attack, but she left with a parting look at Steve.

“Protect him,” she commanded.

“I always do.” 

She seemed content to leave Danny in his hands, even though Steve was his mate. There were some moments when he wanted to make sure Rachel knew her place, but she was still leaving and that meant that deep down, she did trust him. Danny didn’t seem concerned with any of it, he just made his way to where the Camaro had been parked, climbing into the passenger’s seat without a protest.

That was how Steve knew he was really exhausted.

At the same time, Danny decided that he could still surprise him. 

“Let’s stop at Kamekona’s truck.”

That was the last thing that Steve expected to hear from Danny once they arrived back in Oahu, to the point that he looked at Danny like he’d been possessed by some of those pixies that had been causing so much trouble.

“Are you sure?” Steve asked, even though he knew he should know better than to challenge Danny on what he might or might not want at this point. “It’s been a long few days, we can go home…”

“Babe, if I don’t see for myself with my own two eyes that it’s still standing and pixie-free, I’m never going to relax,” Danny guaranteed, reaching over to lightly tap Steve’s knuckles. “Come on, we can say our hellos to everyone and then no one will bother us. Rachel’s already under strict instructions, might as well get the others in line too.”

Steve tightened his fingers on the steering wheel, but made the next turn to get them to where Kamekona’s truck was usually parked. 

It was still standing, nothing was on fire, and there even appeared to be happy customers milling around while Kamekona served them. On a picnic bench nearby, Chin and Kono sat with Adam. The best news of all was that no matter how far Steve looked, there wasn’t a single pixie in sight. 

Danny spread his arms out as they approached, staring with wonder. “You did it!” He sounded exhausted to Steve’s ears, but it was nice to hear him happy for the first time in days. If all it took was banishing pixies, then he would have flown them back much earlier.

Kono exchanged a look with Chin and Adam, furrowing her brow. “Is it just me, or does he sound shocked that we’re capable of doing our jobs?”

“Definitely not just you,” Chin guaranteed, giving Danny a wry smirk. “Maybe a ‘thank you’? Even a ‘good work’?”

“I leave the team motivation to the big boss,” Danny said, slapping Steve’s back with a hand before sitting down at the picnic table to join them for the meal spread out, leaning forward to grab some of the shrimp, as if he hadn’t already eaten twice on the plane over. He smirked at Steve as he ate, clearly expecting Steve to do all the praising around here. 

Lucky for Steve, he’d been reminded by his mother that he was lucky to have such a supportive team. 

“Great work, team,” Steve praised, settling on the other side of Danny, pressing a palm to his shoulder and squeezing. “I think everyone deserves a little time off and I know that Danny and I could both use it.”

He tried not to feel self-conscious about the looks the others were exchanging. He knew that Danny had called ahead with a warning about what had gone down, but he didn’t know how detailed Danny had been with the news. 

Kono gave them a sympathetic look. “Rachel filled us in,” she admitted. “I know you both will probably argue that you’re fine, but if you ever want one of our Aunties to fill in the role, she’d mother the both of you until you were pleading to stop. You’ll forever be too skinny,” she guaranteed.

“I thought Danny was mother hen enough,” Chin deadpanned, sipping a blood smoothie from his glass. Those things always unnerved Steve, but only because the smell of it didn’t exactly sit well with his wolf tendencies.

Maybe he could get the Governor to teach him to flip between his dual heritages, to try and make them more useful. Maybe he could somehow suppress the wolf’s olfactory talents so he could go into the morgue on cases.

“Somehow, I missed the decades of cooking lessons that I’d need to keep anyone from getting too thin,” Danny replied, a hand on Steve’s back that rubbed soothing circles. He wasn’t sure if Danny was calming him down because of the smell, the last few days, or because he needed the lifeline, but he wasn’t stupid enough to push him away. 

It didn’t take long before Kamekona arrived, two immensely large platters in his hand. 

“On the house!” he announced cheerfully, settling in and gesturing for everyone to dig in. “I never would’ve been able to deal with those pixies without these guys. Adam’s _man bilong save_ ,” he praised, giving Kono an encouraging nod. “You should hold onto him.”

Kono wrapped her hand around his bicep and gave him a pat. 

“Who says he didn’t listen to me?” she bragged.

“It was mostly Kono who got us out of the mess,” Adam agreed. “Besides, we make a good team. Maybe I could even hang around the office?” he suggested, in Steve’s direction. “I know you never put out an official ‘witch wanted’ sign, but…”

It wasn’t a bad idea, really. 

With Jenna and Lori both gone, they could use someone well-versed in the magical aspects of the island so they didn’t have to go running to Rachel every time they needed information. Beyond that, Steve could tell how happy it would make Kono. 

“On one condition,” he said. 

“Oh?”

“You talk to Laura at the Governor’s office,” Steve said, gesturing to Chin, who would probably be blushing if he still could. “I know your covens don’t run together, but the last time I was there, I’m pretty sure she couldn’t take her eyes off of our boy.”

If there were going to be two couples working out of the same office, Steve felt he had to do his part to make sure that Chin wasn’t completely left out.

He glanced over to see whether Chin planned to protest, but he looked quietly embarrassed and pleased at the same time, trying to avoid anyone’s eye contact. It was how Steve knew he was making the right call.

Adam seemed to understand, too, giving Steve a confident nod. “I can do that.”

“Then, welcome aboard.” Steve reached over the table to shake Adam’s hand. 

His stomach growled loudly, which made them all put aside work talk to focus on filling up on Kame’s delicious shrimp, which tasted even better with the knowledge that not a single pixie interfered in the making of it. It felt good to be able to not talk about the last few weeks for a while and having home cooked food was a balm for his soul he hadn’t known he needed.

They stayed with the team until sunset, talking about insignificant things happening on the island, because even though no one had said anything, it was easy enough to read the room and understand that Danny and Steve were both too tired to talk about the details of what happened in Virginia.

“Okay, I gotta get Steve home,” brought him out of his reverie. 

Steve snapped back to reality when he felt Danny’s hands squeezing his shoulders. He’d drifted, half-asleep, and had put himself into a daze so he didn’t have to focus on anything. 

“I think he’s so tired I might even get to drive my own car for once.”

“Just the once,” Steve agreed, because he was exhausted. 

He even let Danny manhandle him into the car, driving them all the way home, and maybe it was his exhaustion that allowed the werewolf to dominate, but his sense of smell was heightened so much that as soon as they rounded the corner, he let out a needy sound, with home so close. 

“Almost there, babe,” Danny promised. “Stay awake just a little while longer.”

After long days, exhausting travel, and more emotional trauma than he’d dealt with in years, Steve felt like the trip back from the beach to the house was a blur. Danny managed to get them inside and out of their shoes, but they didn’t change into sleeping clothes and neither of them managed more than a few grunts masquerading as conversation as they collapsed into bed.

“Danny…”

“Hmm?”

“Thank you,” he murmured. “For all of it. Everything. I’m gonna do better when it comes to us.”

“Me too, babe,” was Danny’s reply, his lips pressing a soft kiss to Steve’s neck. “That goes both ways.”

He knew it was probably disappointing, but he managed to kiss Danny clumsily about once or twice before he drifted to sleep. There was so much still that needed to be done, but he didn’t want to do anything but lie here with Danny for the next week. His uninterrupted sleep only lasted a few hours, but soon he was awake again.

Awake, but feeling more like himself. 

With the sound of the ocean coming in through the window, Steve finally felt right. He was curled around Danny and though neither of them was sleeping easily these days, he didn’t feel the need to go chasing his mother around the world or to dig up other family secrets. Lifting his head to rest his cheek on Danny’s shoulder, there was something else he wanted to do.

“Hey,” he murmured. “You’re awake too, huh?”

“Been buzzing ever since I woke up on the flight back,” Danny admitted. “It’ll die down in a few days and I’ll be back to normal. What about you, huh? I would’ve thought you’d be deep in puppy REM by now, whimpering and kicking your little feet, but you stayed that way for about three hours and now you’re back awake.”

“I’ve been thinking since we got back,” he said, rubbing his thumb in circles against Danny’s neck. It had been a brief thought on the plane ride back, but now that it had taken root, he knew how much he wanted to do it.

Danny huffed out a laugh. “Where are you dragging me next?”

“I want to meet your kids,” Steve said, not teasing or joking. This was something to seriously talk about and it had been on his mind since they started talking about Matt Williams. “We should give Matt a proper send-off and a burial, and then I want to start travelling to meet the rest of them.” 

From the look on Danny’s face, it might have been the most romantic suggestion that Steve had ever made in his life. 

“Maybe in a little while,” he agreed. “I don’t know about you, but I think I’ve had enough action to last me for at least the next few months and I gotta warn the kids about their new step-father,” Danny murmured. “Teach them how to get you to roll over so they can rub your belly.”

Steve huffed out a laugh as he pressed his face into Danny’s neck. “I mean it, Danny. They’re an important part of your life and I want to meet them. I can’t believe I haven’t asked until now, but I want to make that right. They’re your family, which means I want to make them mine, too.” 

That was what he’d learned.

“Steve,” he murmured, cupping his cheek. “Yeah. Yeah, we can do that. Some of them are gonna hate you, but…I think that’s a great idea. I’ll introduce the family to you. We probably should have done that ages ago, but I think it’s the right play. My family and my mate. Together.”

Family was the one you chose. Some of it could be blood, some of it could be found, but you didn’t owe anyone something just because you shared DNA. 

Steve planned to make Danny’s family his own, and he was more than willing to put the work into it. 

Together, they’d always found the warmth and solace they needed in each other. Steve had gone halfway around the world in search of a family that he’d lost, but all the while, he had his forever family beside him and behind him in their support. It was his turn to be there for Danny and the others, knowing the whole truth of what and who he was.

In the long run, it didn’t make that much of a difference. He’d already known who he was. DNA and a different genetic supernatural profile might skew that, but it didn’t change it.

He was Danny’s mate. He was a boss. He was a proud friend and he would do anything to protect his team. He was far from perfect, flawed in his own ways, but willing to fight for the people he loved. Most importantly, to Five-0, he was enough and they loved him and accepted him. For Danny, he was imperfect and perfect for him at the same time.

That was who Steve McGarrett was, and for his family, he planned to never change who he was.


End file.
